Plasticville kits

[Anonymous]

Do any of you know how well the Plasticville kits scale out against 1/43, 1/48 and 1/50 scale vehicles? I have seen photos in CTT and OGR of some of these kits that have been painted and detailed. They looked very good, however, I am concerned that they may be too small compared to my vehicles. I am going to build a high rail layout one year and have been slowly collecting trains, vehicles and building kits, but haven't tried Plasticville yet. I would look at my local hobby shops, but they all went out of business and the closest one is over two hours away. [:(]

[Frank53]

If you are going to paint, build and detail the kit, as opposed to snapping it together and not doing any detailing, it will be right at home on a more sceniced layout. If you look around at sites of super detailed layouts, it seems there is always at least a PlasticVille Colaing Tower somewhere to be found. I've built a switch tower, caling tower and teh Ice Cream Stand for future use on my layout and I think the goal is achieved if you can look at them and not think they are PlasticVille.

[Anonymous]

If this is Bachmann Plasticville you are talking about you should first try automobiles and trucks scaled to 1:87th Scale or HO Scale. Compare them to the openings of the doors. Try the HO Scale figures next to them as well.

Then work up to 1:64th Scale or S Scale.

If you try 1/43rd Scale then you have gone too large. You have to have mostly true 1/48th Scale Buildings and Freight Cars to justify the use of 1/43rd Scale. It is big when compared to 1/64th Scale.

Plasticville buildings are best for the background of an O Scale Model Railroad.

The Kalamazoo Rider's Hobby Shop went out of business about 1 year ago. There are still at least 3 more hobby shops with trains in Kalamazoo County.

Andrew Falconer.

[Dave Farquhar]

Plasticville buildings were designed to be able to go on either an O gauge or S gauge layout. The design compromise was to make the doors 1:48 scale, but the garage doors are closer to 1:64 (S scale). A 1:43 vehicle fits in a Plasticville garage, but it's a tight fit. Then again, if I tried to put a '57 Chevy into the garage on my real house (built in 1964) it would be a tight fit too. Not all garages are big. They were pretty clever about choosing designs for houses that would work in either scale. It just ends up being a smaller house on an O scale layout than on S.

Bachmann does have a line of HO scale Plasticville buildings too, but the larger O/O27/S buildings are fine on an O scale layout. I've seen plenty of painted and detailed Plasticville buildings on hirail layouts in magazines.

[jefelectric]

It looks to me like they are not all the same scale. Most are OK for O gauge but I have a problem with the water tank as it looks like it is way to small, almost HO size. I have a barn which is a good way to put a barn on the layout without using all the space that a true scale barn would take up. As was mentioned above the coaling tower is a good model. They are very reasonably priced.

[Anonymous]

Thanks guys. The coaling tower and water tower were on top of my list. Looks like I will get the coal tower and skip the water tower. Any of you know of a good(cheap), plastic kit of a water tower?

[Jumijo]

We have a lot of Plasticville on our layout. The size doesn't bother me. Below is a photo of the unfinished section of our layout. The water tower is from K-Line, I believe. It can be found inexpensively at train shows.




Jim

[phillyreading]

Some of the recent Plasticville kits are reasonably priced, the older Plasticville kits from the 50's or 60's can be expensive to buy today, one example is the Toll Plaza kit.

Lee.

[rlplionel]

A great resource for vintage Plasticville buildings, information and parts is found at this website:

http://www.tandem-associates.com/plasticville/plasticville.htm

I was able to find almost all of the missing parts for my Plasticville buildings through him. Also, thanks to the many detailed graphics on the site, I was able to inquire about parts that I didn't even know were missing on my buildings.

Robert
http://home.surewest.net/rlplionel/Robert.htm

[dwiemer]

For a water tower, I picked up a K-line ceramic water tower that looks great for about $19.00 and that was a regular price before the demise of K-line.
Dennis