Track plans in old magazines

I'm in the process of culling my huge stack of magazines, as I really don't want to move with that much paper again.

About 1980-2000 I used to read American model railroad magazines, almost every issue of some. Now I'm looking at a few issues from 1980-85 and what strikes me is that many of the track plans are really bad. It's not clear how they're supposed to be operated, there are slopes on run around tracks, often the tracks aren't laid out even close to what would be done in reality. Often for no good reason at all. But then I probably thought they were good and were inspired by them.