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Oh dear, it's being one of those days! Not sure how/why my first attempt at this suddenly cut-off then got posted several times. I'm starting over. Thanks once again for your responses. The matter of brick bonds regularly crops up in the British rail model press, mainly when some new kit appears with stretcher bond walling, when the prototype is from a pre-stretcher era. Most of the British railway companies in the 19/20th centuries built their structures in 'English Bond', where rows of all stretchers and all headers alternate. This is a very strong bond, also about the most difficult to lay well. Most other brick buildings in Britain in this same period were made in 'Flemish Bond', where each row consists of alternate headers and stretchers, staggered so that a header in one row is in the middle of the stretcher in both the row above and that below. Cheaper structures were done in '#Garden Wall', where you get several rows of stretchers (usually three or five), then a row of headers. As most walls are two bricks thick, as Dave says, the headers, being placed crosswise, tie the two 'skins' together and the wall has good load-bearing properties. Since the 1950s/60s and the concept of cavity walling for insulation, domestic buildings, small factories, etc. have had a non-load-bearing outer skin of all stretcher brickwork. Brick has also come back into favour as a purely decorative outer cladding for steel and concrete buildings, again it is just all stretcher. I am aware, as you have mentioned, that all-stretcher is the contemporary US norm too. Since these distinctive brick bonds are an important factor in good prototype modelling for many UK modellers, and I'm part of that culture and enjoy modelling buildings as much as trains, I've simply been trying to discover what was the norm, particularly in New England from, say, 1850-1960. I wondered how prototypical those Boston buildings were - the pictures were taken in the mid-1960s and the buildings obviously had been around some years. I know many North American modellers are sticklers for accuracy, period detail, etc., but sight of all those stretcher walls on kit-built/bashed buildings on period-set layouts in 'Model Railroader' and elsewhere had me wondering if the kits themselves lived up to the ideal. I'll keep on looking for prototype references in books and magazines, but if anyone else on the forum has any hard details or thoughts I'll be pleased to hear.
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