Category: Structures

I received this Design Preservation Models kit as a gift from Chris when he took me on a birthday shopping spree in 2021 to The Electric Train Shop, Eastside Trains and Skyway Model Shop. I assembled the exterior walls in late April, and on May 1, I painted the side and rear walls with a mix of Model Master acrylic Railroad Tie Brown, Boxcar Red and Engine Black. During the same spray booth session, I was painting this mix onto the rear and sides of Building 7. The next day, I painted the front with a mix of Aged Concrete, Railroad Tie Brown and Engine Black. I didn’t take any photos of this building at the time, but I logged these steps in the Excel spreadsheets where I keep track of the steps I take. Then, the project sat idle for just over two years, when most of my modeling time was consumed by Building 7.

Building 7 was completed in late April 2023, and about a month later, I was getting very close to finishing Building 4. I was ready …

Continue Reading →

Technically, I started this building in January 2020 when I sanded the edges of the exterior walls, but the parts went back in the package until that May. I then took three days to fill divots on the interior walls with plastic putty, glue the walls together, prime them and apply a base coat of paint. I filled the divots because I planned on painting those surfaces for use in the interior scenes. I later decided it was much easier and looked better if I covered the walls of interior scenes with paper, printed with my own custom graphics. The putty would shrink a lot while drying, requiring multiple coats and lots of drying time. It was too much work.

On the base coat of paint, I was going for a warm yellow brick color, like I had seen on a lot of older buildings around Pittsburgh. I used a mix of Model Master acrylic International Orange, Reefer Yellow, Rust and a touch of Grimy Black. Unfortunately, it was way too orange and would have to be repainted, but it sat idle for nine months. In February 2021, I tried to strip the orange paint with 91% isopropyl alcohol, but …

Continue Reading →

Building 3 started as the Design Preservations Models kit “Townhouse 1”. It was only the second building interior I had detailed, and my plans for it changed a lot during the process, resulting in some behind-the-scenes construction that looks a little sloppy, but I’m really happy with the visible parts, and that’s what really matters.

I started this project simultaneously with Building 2 in April 2019, but then didn’t touch it again until January of 2020. On March 23 that year, I began working from home, and the state’s “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” order took effect, keeping everyone at home except for essential activities. While people complained about having to stay home, I was actually excited about how much modeling time I’d have. By March 28, I finished painting the exterior, and about a month later, I sketched floor plans to figure out what interior scenes I would build. I decided the signature feature would be a stairwell visible through the door and windows above it, leading to a bulkhead on the rooftop where some women would be doing laundry in a washtub and hanging it up to dry.

I built the stairwell scene as a self-contained module which I …

Continue Reading →

My seventh structure project started from the “Front Street Building” kit by Design Preservation Models (Woodland Scenics), which I bought during a husband-sponsored birthday shopping spree at our local hobby shops in March 2021.

When I began the project, I already had four other structure projects at various stages of completion, but the idea of creating two storefronts plus two upstairs businesses in one building seemed like a lot of fun, and a little different than the buildings I was already working on, so I got started anyhow, painting the exterior before I decided what would be inside. I’d get back to the other buildings later. Sometimes switching projects can renew my level of interest and excitement for the hobby in general, and defuses frustration that may creep in with other projects, which are sometimes resolved more easily after taking a break and then taking a fresh look later.

I had some pretty solid ideas on what I wanted the four businesses to be, after having studied photos from Historic Pittsburgh and other sources, depicting interior and exterior views of various Pittsburgh businesses from the 30s and 40s, including the four I ultimately chose: a pharmacy, produce market, beauty salon …

Continue Reading →

I started this project on April 7, 2019, a few months after purchasing the Design Preservation Models (Woodland Scenics) kit “Kelly’s Saloon” at the train show in Puyallup. The idea to model a derelict storefront came when browsing Pittsburgh Bureau of Building Inspection photographs on Historic Pittsburgh.

I found one of them particularly appealing, and it had the same basic storefront design as this kit, making it easy to recreate. I liked the broken windows, the grime, the many signs and posters attached to the front, and the fact that two of the posters were for Kennywood and West View, two local amusement parks. The photos were of such high resolution that I was able to read all of the lettering on the signs and recreate them at scale in Illustrator and Photoshop. I completed this model on December 17, 2020.…

Continue Reading →

Something that stood out to me in photos of Pittsburgh street scenes in the 1930s and 1940 is the number of billboards on roads and buildings. There were dozens on Carson Street in what I call the Terminal and West End scenes. Most of them had the same basic wood construction, usually painted green. I’ve seen photos of a different design, painted white, but the green ones were more common.

I found plans for scratch-building this type of billboard using scale lumber, in an article titled “Highway billboards from the 1930s and ’40s” by Stanley Reynolds in the August 1989 issue of Model Railroader magazine. In another issue (I’ve lost track of which one), the magazine provided copies of vintage billboard graphics, which I printed on my crappy old inkjet printer. Future billboards (I’ll need a lot more) will be printed on my new color laser printer, which prints in higher quality.

I assembled one of my first billboards without its support structure and mounted it to the side of Building 2, the derelict storefront. These first two billboards were built and painted over a few days each, in June 2020.…

Continue Reading →

One of the photos I saved from the Historic Pittsburgh site was the above photo of an Atlantic gas station on Perrysville Avenue in West View (just outside of Pittsburgh). Its simple architecture stood out to me as a good choice for my first shot at building a model structure completely from scratch. Historic photos of the areas I’m modeling show other Atlantic gas stations, and some quick Googling shows that this was a common style of gas station design, with the enameled metal panels on the front and often the same layout as the building in the photo.

For guidance on how to model the structure, I first looked at the Crafton Avenue Service Station model kit made by City Classics. It’s a little too simplified for my taste, and has a chunky look to it, so I didn’t get much inspiration from it, and moved on. Next, I searched the Model Railroader archive and found a helpful article with plans for building a similar type of gas station (Scratchbuild a Pair of Gas Stations, by Jeff Wilson, November 1993). Prior to reading this article, I wasn’t sure how to make the raised lettering for the front …

Continue Reading →