Background Buildings

You might consider using components from DPM or Walthers. You can buy fronts, etc., and just use short "sides" and roofs. It sure beats buying entire kits just to use one side.

Ed

in article v3E%d.14668$UV2.1931@trnddc04, Wa-Kiki at snipped-for-privacy@verizon.net wrote on 3/21/05 10:07 AM:

The basic idea is good, but might I suggest "backs", rather than fronts? That's what I see from most train windows :-).

Backs or fronts, this shelf unit is much harder to plan and "visualize" than the last one I built.

Except for the picture in the Atlas track plan book, I've had little success finding pictures of similar layouts to see possibilities of what such a layout might look like.

I'm still trying to decide if it's going to be worth the effort or not.

Art Curran's approach might help you - he never looked at a kit as a kit, rather a source of raw materials. If it looked "interesting" - and to Art, a cannery was never a cannery, a printers works was never a printery - he would buy it, then photocopy all the major components many times, then use scissors, glue and tape to try different arrangements out. When he was satisifed, he had a ready made pattern to cut up the plastic bits with.

That might be of use to you.

Steve Newcastle NSW Aust

Try this company,

although it is British Outline it may give you ideas Rob

IIRC, thre have been at least a couple of urban switching shelf layouts in MR over the last few years. Others can probably tell you the names and the issues, my memory isn't that good.

Wander down by your favorite railroad on an overcast day and take digital photos of buildings. Massage the size in a photo-editing program and print them out for use along the background. Add dimensionality by backing some with foam-core and adding kit components on the face of others.

Hi Group, Some input from Europe, Damark to be exectly. Im in a mrr club running H0 and privat I like N-scale more, so I do both. For the H0-club are my colege members and I building With cardboard, plaster (we cast model copies ourselves or carve out Wall parts and so). Our problem is Denmark, there arn not many tipical Danish buildings on the market, specialy not from our region, so we have to make them ourselves. Using photographs (freshly taken or from historic books. Work them out on the computer (my graphical knoledge help a lot). The computer drawings are printed to be used as outher sandwich layer on cardboard or as measurement to carve in plaster or other materials. For my N-scale lay out I only use the sandwich method, by printing on Aquarel paper, and use other kinds of paper to immitate original builings. I must say I like printed paper better than plastic, and the ammount of time cutting and gluing paper pieces is the same when you have to weater plastic buildings.

HC, Denmark

"My wife and I just moved out of our apartment and into a new home a couple of weeks ago. At first I thought this was a good thing and that I could do away with my 4x6 layout and build something bigger and better.

Unfortunately this isn't the case. Our new home seems to have doors and

windows in all the wrong places and I am going to end up building a shelf layout similar to what is in the Atlas layout books."

You can always kitbash the house. have the windows taken out and replaced with wall.

"My question is where do you get buildings for the background for a layout like this? The Walthers catalog seems pretty limited on this type of kit. Do you buy full sized kits and then cut them in half or is there a better way?"

You could take photographs for buildings [1:1 scale] you like and have them blown up to the right scale. Then cut them out, paste them on the backdrop and dullcoat them.

You have buildings that no one else has that way.

You can use use the library of congress image database to locate pics and use them or use soople.com specific image search function to find pics.

Eric

There are a couple of switching layouts in the current Model Railroad Planning magazine. One is a true shelf style layout while the other is somewhat wider than a shelf.

Which Atlas plan are you building? I built the one that is about 12x8 "L" shape. It has a "Y" in the corner for turning locos and cars. I've had it for about 20 years; it has served me well.

But, the tracks on that aren't really parallel to the walls, so you might need the whole building to cut them at angles to make them fit along the track. Just a thought.

Also, never throw anything away... the back you cut off might just be a part of another building somewhere else on the layout.

Good luck!

dlm

I haven't decided between HO17 Limited Shelf Space and HO27 Southside Connecting. I really liked HO19 (the L shaped one but I don't have enough space.

The room is 16.5' x 9.5'. The problem is on one of the 16.5' walls there is an entry door on one end and a closet door at the other. On the other long wall there is a large 3 bay window and I didn't really want to build in front of the windows.

I have about 11' of wall space between the doors and I was going to use that for a shelf layout. I tried setting up my old layout and even though it was just 4' x 6', it just consumed the whole room. (I have a couple of aquariums in there too!)

I'm glad to hear some positive feedback on this type of layout. I've seen several track plans, but I've never actually seen one that was complete so I was a bit apprehensive about sinking the money into it just to be disappointed.

Someone stated that there had been some shelf layouts in MR magazine. I guess I need to go check their database and find the back issues.

Thanks for the positive input. I was about to give up on the whole idea!

When I was in the Train Shop (Santa Clara, CA) today, I saw some paper building kits for sale. Depending on how far away the background buildings are to be, you might consider creating them out of paper, though not necessarily from these kits. Print photos of building fronts, etc., and paste them to some stiff card stock.

If they are to represent buildings at a considerable distance, you might print them smaller than HO scale. Or if you use plastic kits, use n-scale buiding to make them appear distant.

Ed

in article bLq0e.17381$b_6.17215@trnddc01, Wa-Kiki at snipped-for-privacy@verizon.net wrote on 3/23/05 7:47 PM:

Cat, could you please tell me which group the buildings are in? I didn't see any group that looked likely to have them.

cat wrote:

On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 04:06:21 GMT, "Edward A. Oates" purred:

Even simpler and with a FAR wider variety of buildings, come to papermodels at

where you will find links to thousands of paper buildings some more detailed than you can imagine and you can't beat the prices...free. Don't like paper? You can print them on plastic and build them that way. Heck a few of us have printed out loco shells onto metal and had a sturdy shell. this is an international group so you will find stuff for every scale and outline and if you can't find what you want, just ask, someone will either know where to find it or will make it themselves and put it up for download.

cat

I've only had time to search through a couple of the groups but some of the stuff is very impressive. I couldn't imagine what a paper building might look like but they look very nice.

I just can't tell what the texture would be like from the pictures.

On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 11:26:25 -0500, "Frank A. Rosenbaum" purred:

Papermodels is a general group. Join and check the links section. Peter Visser has a huge link site and buildings as well as railroad gear is a prominent part. If you can't find it ask on list for a link to Peter's "Iceberg" list. It is a very friendly group with a good sense of humor and can be very helpful, especially to newcomers. You will be surprised at what is available (a site with all versions of the TGV, old steam and diesel models from around the world, lineside structures made using actual photos, you name it, we have it or can find it.

cat

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I use Walthers "Instant Buildings" (949-722 - 949-725) for backgrounds. I use two sheets of a scene, glueing one directly to hardboard. I cut out the buildings with shadows, indicating they're in the foreground, from the second sheet and glue them to

1/4" foam or foam-core sheets and trim the foam to match the building outline. A little flat black on the edge of the foam, and glue it to the first sheet directly over where that building is.

If it's a deeper building, e.g., theirs a water tank shown on the roof, I use a piece of 1" or 2" thick foam for the backing and replace the printed water tank with a built up roof top water tank kit. I also use the appropriate DPM wall sections to build out bays where a car would be delivered into a building.

Len

Eric,

Keep in mind that if you do cut a building in half, you actually end up with two backdrop structures. A little paint & maybe some different trim pieces and they won't look the same either. I'd also suggest not cutting them at

90° angles... Different angles will make the resulting backdrop look much more 3D.

dlm