I have copied and pasted this from another thread. Our train show begins on Friday with set up and layout operations and since I'm on the committee things are getting busy, but I didn't want to ignore this thread.
Some when I used to flog the word nolix, assumed it meant I thought I had created the idea of a variety of ways for trains to gain elevation and they reacted to that. I have never claimed I invented various nolix construction, some modeler's when layout designing have used their ideas of how to get trains up to the second level (or third level, fourth....etc) for decades, they were the early "in" on the notion of a nolix. And as you will see below, John Armstrong coined the word. What I have been doing is trying to bring a word into our hobby usage so that we can better communicate what it is we are doing in a track plan.
Back in roughly 2000 I had read the article of an Armstrong plan Jim Money's Athabasca RR in the 1998 edition of MODEL RAILROAD PLANNING. In it Money recruited Armstrong to create a layout plan and was adamant he didn't want a helix, he was so adamant that Armstrong drew up an initial plan with three helix's. Jim asked John to draw up another plan doing away with helix's which Armstrong did. Armstrong in a moment of humour decided to call the "place" (not the thing) a nolix for no helix. What John A created was a peninsula that allowed maximum visibility of trains but also, like a helix, allow them to gain elevation.
Also in roughly 2000 I became the moderator of the layout design forum at Trainboard which I was part of for roughly five years. Since the forum was my suggestion and the other moderator added to that forum quit after three months, I was basically on my own. The independence gave me a public forum for ideas which influenced others. The idea I flogged the most, particularly for N scaler's was the idea of a nolix.
When I read the planning article of Money's Athabasca RR, I decided the word "nolix" was useful to the hobby; we had a word to describe a "standardized" circular incline to move trains from level to level, but we didn't have a word for non-standardized construction to move trains from level to level. What also became apparent to me when looking at Armstrong's plan was the trains were visible, much more than in any helix with a window or what have you, and the visible area was incorporated into the scenery. So I decided - "a nolix was a non-standardized helix with the purpose of moving trains from one level to another creating as much visibility of trains as possible, incorporating these visible areas into the scenery."
I then preached this concept near and far, from Model Railroader mag to the Atlas forum, to obviously the Trainboard layout design forum, the layout design sig, etc. The problem for me was that helix's tend to be a large blob with not much sceniking options, pretty much a big circular mountain. In N scale because of our lesser requirements for "broad" curves, you could have a peninsula only 40 inches wide and you could have a nolix, or a corner area such as I have used and have a nolix. The peninsula that Armstrong created for Money was very large as you can imagine it would have to be in HO.
I became inactive in the hobby with severe hobby burnout, all my activities on the net (being moderator and an active participant, particularly on the Atlas forum) died out, and with medical problems I kind of drifted away from the scene. Currently I am seriously playing with the idea of writing an article on "Nolix's" for one of the RR mags.
Where I have changed over the years is that I have decided the word nolix by itself isn't that useful; the reason being is that if I say helix, because of its standardization, we can visualize one. But, if I say nolix, because it is not standardized, visualizing one is difficult. Or what you have visualized may be different than what I produce, so confusion can result as it has in this current thread (I edited this in for this thread) thus helping back up my assumption that the word nolix needs to be expanded.
So my conclusion is that other words need to be paired with nolix for us to get a better idea of its usage. So if I say Lee has a "peninsula nolix" we can draw some rough conclusions about it in our head, if I say Rick has an L shaped nolix we can have a better understanding of nolix, or again I can say Bill has an around the walls nolix, and we understand the concept.
When I took English 101 in Elmhurst College in Illinois I can still remember discussing how words evolved out of need an usage. For example, the text illustrated the word "bluff" (geography) that the English used to laugh at, but the problem for the English was they needed a sentence to describe what the word bluff conjured. So we can do away with the funny word nolix but then we are reduced to trying to describe this area on the layout that isn't a helix and need a sentence or more to do it. All I am really flogging is clearer communication in and around layout design.
So do I have a nolix, I say yes, this from the guy who made the word popular.
Here is a link to me talking about the concept of a nolix at Trainboard back in 2002 when I was a moderator there:
http://www.trainboard.com/grapevine/showthread.php?68709-Another-Nolix-(track-plan)
Here is me talking and Andy Sperandeo responding in a thread in the Model RR forum, back in 2002:
http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/88/t/3517.aspx
