Best Of Your favorite, less common, city buildings.

[thomasjmdavis]

Oops,  left the link out of my earlier post

http://www.shorpy.com/node/14475?size=_original#caption

[Upstate Gator]

Nice picture Tom.

To hijack the thread briefly, I have a question about the Wabash freight house across the Dearborn Station leads. It looks like Wabash moved out shortly after their mid 1950s fire. Did that freight house go to Lifschultz in the late 1950s? 1960s pix show the blue metal addition with their signage.

[wm3798]

Okay, I have a few more minutes to dedicate to a reply.

You need to go through your stacks of stuff, and see what you have available that can be turned into more unique buildings.  Spend some time looking at stuff in York or other areas that have the right feel for the area you're modeling, then start crashing the images and ideas together...

A couple of examples...
Paul Hutter shot these for me in Cumberland, since I was on the verge of building part of the downtown when the axe fell...



You may recognize the arched facade as being part of an old Heljan kit (I think you sold it to me at Kleins...)  I used strip stock and other odds and ends to replicate the windows and trims.  I used DPM modular walls to fabricate the sides.

I have the building on the right started, ... I used the back wall of a ConCor roundhouse with the two arched windows as a start.

This was the bash of all bashes, I used 3 of the ConCor brick station kits to scab this mess together, along with some walls from a factory to build the concourse on the back.

 The big tower roof was scratch built using the old London Fog tower on 83 in Woodberry as a guide.

I also used reconfigured Heljan/Model Power parts to build much of the paper mill.


Sometimes you can take a more or less stock kit, and just glom a modern appendage onto it.

I took the old AHM brick factory and put a metal warehouse around two sides of it.  Helped to make it look more modern, and of a size that might require rail service.

Or add some scratch built sections to make it stand out... or in this case, up...


And then there's the art of the "Compound" structure... In this case, a stock DPM building is the office portion of the program, then I took bits and pieces of others to build the "old" factory against the back drop, then added some modern metal sheds to house the newer portions of the facility.


When you're working in flats, don't forget that the fronts you use also have backs...  Add a few details and some signs, and you can create a nice canyon effect using the leftovers of a main street scene.


And of course, you can't deny the usefulness of modulars.




Of course, the simplest thing to do is to accessorize those DPMs to make them your own...

[chicken45]

2. It's on every single layout. It's weird, I know, but having have worked in a hobby shop, and being in this stuff for so long, when I see a DPM building on a layout, my brain doesn't see "Surkowsky Sausage Mart", it sees "that's DPM 51600 again". It actually kinda sucks and makes this much more difficult than it should be!

How do you spell my last name again?

[wm3798]

A few more from the archives...

Another DPM Modular, with some paint, details and signs.  Also built on an odd lot at North Junction.




Another flat built from the back wall of a factory.

And here's one I did using bits of larger buildings and some modular parts to build a block of rowhouse flats, which I believe are also indigenous to York and environs...



FYI, I used some dollhouse door casing to make the cornices.
Lee

[Blazeman]

Drove through downtown York on business 83 several times. Recall it looking like any other downtown. The old train station is a little different in how the business district grew around it.

I'm thinking of  the wooden homes in places outside the town, like Dover or Stoverstown. Close your eyes and you would easily imagine being there in late June of 1863 noting some CSA patrols in the hills. One could say that about many parts of York and Adams counties.  Outside of downtown, little exposure to place. Touch it now and then when stopping in at White Rose Hobbies on Mt. Rose (124).

Are you planning interchange there with Adam (mu26aeh)?

[R L Smith]

It so happened that I had a meeting at York College last night, so I was paying attention to the structures on my way in and out of downtown because of this thread.   I'd say those brick bay-windowed 3 story homes Dave V linked to on Shapeways are spot-on for residential units in York.  Although there are some two-story homes, most seem to be 3-story (at least on the main drags).

Ron

[wm3798]

Those West Philly rowhouses are not only double hot looking, they're damn cheap in the N Scale variety.  I'd get them by the handful.

The CMR rowhouses are nice and plain jane, but hell, for $30 I can buy an awful lot of modular wall systems and roll my own...



Lee

[wazzou]

Those West Philly rowhouses are not only double hot looking, they're damn cheap in the N Scale variety.  I'd get them by the handful.

Lee

Yeah, you'd need a fortune if you were in O Scale. 

[Ed Kapuscinski]

How do you spell my last name again?

Incorrectly, apparently.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Those West Philly rowhouses are not only double hot looking, they're damn cheap in the N Scale variety.  I'd get them by the handful.

Those are hot. Also, that's my plan...

And thanks for the other good tips. Those are all part of the plant too. In fact, as things progress, I would be happy to trade a few beers for some "consulting".

[tom mann]

Ed,

Both the Walthers American Hardware and Furniture Co. are everywhere because they are nice kits that resemble prototypes in practically every major city.  If you buy two of each, you can kitbash them into something that closely matches the size of actual buildings.  Make your own signs.

I just don't want you to get all hipsterish and fill your layout with Tomytec Japanese buildings because they are uncommon on layouts- unless you want to model an alternate reality of York, Pa if the Japanese had won WWII.

[DeltaBravo]

Look around the show this weekend pick up a few items and kick bash them mix in a few DPMs and no one will know.

[randgust]

It's taken me a long time, but when I first planned the layout I laid out the streets as close as I could to the prototype layout.  I had some pretty good pictures of Flagstaff, and most of the buildings 'sorta-kinda' looked like some kits, or could be bashed.   Most were kind of unique.

So I did the best I could with stock kits matching what was in place, with the idea that 'someday' I'd replace them with better scratchbuilt structures.  It's taken forever, but basically, that's completed.  Meanwhile, if I was even close with a kit, I was good.  Finding exact matches to kitbash was harder than I thought.

Probably my best example is the Commercial Hotel.   If you look on my older layout shots, you'll see a semi-stock 4-story Model Power hotel, at least painted the right color, in that spot, but yeah, just like everybody elses.   As the real building burned in '75, and is an empty lot today, it took a lot of research to do it but I did find it and finished it a couple years ago.   That's one of the last ones I did.   

Original build:

Replacement:


Bottom line is 1)  it's really OK to have 'stock kits' but don't drive yourself broke and nuts searching for the perfect atypical kit, as 2)  You're lucky.  There's hundreds of buildings left from your era, and when it finally hits you that it's not much more difficult to scratch real buildings than to build kits, you'll be off and running.  With Google Earth, you can measure buildings from the sky, and run Streetview to get more dimensions if you know length v. height.  Another good example of that is the little building beside the hotel - a the time I was working with a photo and bashed a Model Power storefront, actual measurements showed the real building was significantly smaller - and you can see the new Strathmore 'front' in place to fit.

[OldEastRR]

Ed, you can disguise the stock look of DPM buildings by stretching them upward:



Another mod: the cast iron fronts below the windows were replaced with brick.

Or stretch them sideways:



More mods: one of the single doorways was cut off, and all the upper windows had their tops rounded by file and xacto. A new cornice made of various Evergreen stock pieces. The  roof is a curved one from the Walthers Stateline Supply building, it still needs to be cut and reworked to sit properly.

Even different chimneys make the buildings unique:



And another roof change: the building with a high peaked front has a high peaked roof to match it (farthest building)

If you love to go crazy with DPM mods you can rework them into things like this one I call "Small Town Sears Store"