Raised on the Erie Lackawanna Mainline- Supt. of the Black River Transfer & Terminal R.R.
Roger and Grimek - My station is built from just the material found in a single Bailey's kit. The wall at the right of the structure is a stock wall from the kit, as is the blank "rear" wall. I have a policy of not kitbashing more than necessary to get the results I want and over the years have picked up a talent MR's Art Curren had: the ability to visualize how to re-arrange parts of a kit to form various alternative structures based just on the box cover's photo. Comes in quite handy.
Re a layout tour, you'll find a brief one by clicking below, followed by a link to my much more extensive Photobucket page.
http://s64.photobucket.com/albums/h182/CNJ831/HHRRtour/?albumview=slideshow
CNJ831
CNJ831,
What a great kitbash! I've done some kitbashing but none better than yours.
How many kits did you use. And how did you get the wall to the right (as seen looking at your front entrance) to have several small windows on two stories and the small street level door at the corner?
Is the rear of the building seen above the tracks in the next to last photo (with the red switcher in the foreground)? If so, how did you piece together that wall without any windows?
Roger Johnson
I used two of the kits to kitbash a quasi representation of the Union Station in Dallas, but from the off-street (track) side, so had no use for the columns. When I tried to build a concourse over the track using what was left over, it did not turn out well. So, I went with the CMR concourse kit and that fit right in. Still a little detail and clean-up work to be done, but other than picking the wrong paint color, it's going to look pretty good.
Ahhh, another former Metropolitan Area guy! I grew up just north of the Bronx, along the New Haven's trackage, a long, long time ago.
Regarding the station's construction from the basic Bailey's S&L kit, in my case only three sides are accessible to the viewer, so I used the fourth (in this instance the kit's intended front entrance) as a source of kitbashing materials. The columns and their supports are a separate part from the front facade, so I brought them around to the building's long side and with some cutting and fitting, attached them there. Several Vollmer/Heljan platforms and a passenger overpass kit were employed to get my passengers from the street-level floor of the station down to track-level.
I have the following photos of the station with the work in-progress:
Hope these are helpful.
As to the quality of my photos, it comes mainly from a long experience in photography and modeling, plus practice, practice, practice! It also helps that I did landscape painting in oils for a time, giving me a pretty good sense for nature's colors. Over the years these factors have combined to allow me to win the Model Photo Contest at the NMRA's National Convention a quite a number of times. Even so, there are probably 15-20 not so sucessful shots taken for everyone folks on-line ever end up seeing.
The Bailey Savings and Loan is indeed very suitable to adapting into a moderate-sized urban station, particularly in cases where space is at a premium. I did some kitbashing to mine, rearranging some of the building's original structural elements, resulting in the station pictured below. In my case, it is an elevated station with tracks and platforms below.
I was just reading, Bailey Savings & Loan was just taken over by the FDIC. :P
Awesome website tour........I especially enjoyed the car show at Arnold's drive in........
The Walthers web site shows the Bailey Savings & Loan building from a front corner view:
http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/933-3031
We have it on our HO scale club layout as one of the buildings in Murrin Village. It can be seen at http://members.cox.net/cacole2/ and has been renamed as Walker State Bank.