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| The "rectix" on the M & M Sub. |
I
was visiting the website of Brian Keay’s great Wolverine Lynx model railroad
when I came across a word I hadn’t seen before: Ovlix.
On
Brian’s layout, an ovlix
is a version of a helix that is in the shape of an oval (oval + lix
equals ovlix).
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| Brian's "ovlix" |
I
immediately recognized the concept, since it is similar to the way trains
traverse between the lower and upper levels on the Manitoba & Minnesota
Sub.
On
my layout, I also employ something that looks like his ovlix and does the job
of a helix.
In
my case, it goes around a 5 x 9 foot storeroom that also houses my upper and
lower staging yards.
It’s
like an ovlix, but larger. So maybe I can call it a rectix (rectangle
+ lix = rectix).
(Because the size of the room, I can't actually get far enough back to take a photo of the rectix. Plus, it is mostly hidden on one side and both ends.)
I
think Brian is on to something, and maybe I am, too. In addition to the
traditional helix (a circle of track that connects levels) and a nolix (where
the track rises around the walls of a room, as on Bill Darnaby’s Maumee Route
and Tony Koester’s NKP), we can now have words like ovlix and rectix.
They
may not catch on as words of the year, like “post-truth” in 2016, “emoji” in
2015, and “vape” in 2014, but maybe they’ll take off in the model railroad
world.
