Advice on an HO project for work

Probably the biggest place to go to is Walther's Hobby shop. They do both wholesale and retail mailorder for the hobby. I will note that buildings can be rather expensive in some cases.

Many of us build our own structures from balsa, basswood (a bit better grade of wood), plastic sheet and other things. If you've got the time and don't need a lot of detail on the buildings, the plastic sheet (.020" thick styrene sheet from the plastics store) will probably do you better but you need somebody with model building skills to go this route. You can build up quite a large supply of housed and such for little money this way. In any case, it will be an intereting project!

-- Why do penguins walk so far to get to their nesting grounds?

snipped-for-privacy@aconcagua.zzn.com spake thus:

One name: Walthers

David Nebenzahl spake thus:

I should have added that their massive print catalog is available at most hobby shops in the U.S. It's well-organized, so you'll have no trouble locating the "structures" section, with several lines of buildings available, most in kit form. Most of these are pretty easy and fast to put together, assuming you don't need tons of detail for your working model.

I would suggest that you go to your local hobby store and ask to see the 'Walthers HO' catalog. For buldings look in the section labeled 'Structures'. The kits are either of plastic, wood or metal. There are two manufactures who make modular kits. With them you can create any building design or type you want.

If you need HO scale fire trucks there is also a section for vehicles.

There is also Walthers website:

Fred Ellis

I am sure that most of your co-workers would be happy to help assemble your buildings, but, if you tell us where your fire department is, some one in the group would be happy to help with finding a good hobby shop and or assist you with building and detailing the scenes.

If you are in the Battle Creek/Kalamazoo/Portage area of Michigan, I would be glad to assist.

You might also ask the local High School for student volunteers who need to fill their community service hours.

good luck and keep us posted.

Frank Rosenbaum

farosenbaum.at.charterdot net

Thanks for the advice, Frank. Unfortunately I'm out here in Washington state. We're going to start very small with just maybe a neighborhood block or so, along with a couple commercial buildings. As time goes by, we plan on adding more blocks until we have a sizable city. I got the idea recently when attending a fire tactics class where the instructor had built an entire HO scale city, complete with commercial downtown and outlying neighborhoods. Very impressive and a very good way to learn firefighting tactics because you have a 3-D model to look at. It'd be overly expensive for us, however, to build such a large city all at once. That's why we plan on building it a little at a time. I even ran across some sort of electronic gizmo on a website that would allow you to press a button and have "smoke" come out of a scale structure. That would be very cool for our simulator. I imagine it's not much more than the device in hobby locomotives that allows "smoke" to come out of the stack.

Try the walthers catalog number 222-2002. It is a concor kit and includes a motor, pumps, lights, a firefighters, pumper, smoke generator. on sale at 56.98

Or 770-3785 a Volmer kit with a burning 4 story tax office.... (no trucks or figures) Jim Stewart