Hiya!
Since I started setting up my first Christmas layout of the season this week, I thought I'd start sharing some photos! There will be 3 layouts all together this year. The last one to be set up will be the Disneyland Project. In between the Disneyland layout and the Postwar-n-Plasticville bedroom layout I started this week, will come the Standard Gauge set up in the room next door to mine. But for now, we'll focus on the one I'll see most often!
This layout is 4 foot by 6 foot and has 2 loops of track. The outer oval is American Flyer S gauge and the inner is O31 MTH RealTrax. It has a 145 Gateman, a 125 Whistle Shack, a 3472 Milk Car with 3462P platform, an MTH 394 rotating aircraft beacon and an MPC era Banjo Signal. That's it for fancy operating accessories! Otherwise it's all Plasticville and postwar trains! All structures are lighted, but there are no operating streetlights. Just the traditional green Plasticville poles with the glow in the dark globes. For citizens I use 54mm figures and the vehicles I'll use this year will be from my small collection of 1:43 ERTL, Corgi, Road Champs and other die cast cars and trucks.
To start it all off, here's one of my favorite structures, the Howard Johnson's:
This is in fact a modified Plasticville Schoolhouse. To make one, first you need to make sure everything is dissassembled. Clean and fix what you can if you're using an old junker as I did. (See the chip above the sign and the crack on the right end?) Paint the 4 walls white and the roof orange. For the windows, I cut the muntins out of the standard kit windows and painted them in a blue-green to match the signage I made on my PC. I backed the windows with clear plastic from packaging I'd saved and lined them inside with tracing paper to diffuse the light which comes from 2 peel and stick bulbs mounted under the roof.
Here's the big sign:
The sign is made from sheet and strip styrene and the printed signage was done on peel and stick labels. (I think I used CD/DVD labels) Look for a font called "Honest John's" on the net if you want to try it. I downloaded it for free but I don't remember from where.
The weathervane:
I cut the top off of the standard Schoolhouse weathervane and "HoJo-ized" it! To do this, you'll need one of these:
An authentic Howard Johnson's sandwich toothpick! I bought a small collection of them on Ebay for a reasonable price. You could also use a swizzle stick. Just as long as it has the "Simple Simon and the Pieman" shape which was used for decades as the symbol of Howard Johnson's and isn't longer than the arrow bar on the Plasticville weathervane.
And there you have it! An easy, fun and fairly inexpensive way to add a classic eatery from roadside America to your layout! Considering how easy it would have been for Bachmann to do this back in the heydey of toy trains and automobile travel, I'm surprised they never did! If you want to know more about HoJo's, here's a terrific website: http://hojoland.homestead.com/
Tomorrow I'll have more pics as layout construction (and the Christmas tree in the center) progress!
Becky
Trains, trains, wonderful trains. The more you get, the more you toot!
Becky, neat stuff, keep us posted on the progress of your Christmas layouts. With the Disneyland project and now these other layouts about how much time per day are you putting in on the trains.
Bill T.
Well, since I'm handicapped and housebound except for maybe one day a week when I can get out....
I'd say all of the rest of my conscious hours!
Well done Becky, good modeling. Be sure and post photos of your Christmas layouts.
George
HoJo Land:
Installed and lighted. Behind the pick-up truck in which HoJo employees have returned with this year's tree, is the current grey bodied tan roofed Plasticville Motel which completes HoJo's corner of the layout. I'll get pics of that "Motorlodge" tomorrow when I get that section of the layout wired.
But here's what I've done so far:
The tree went up today. Due to furniture issues, the right end is completely inaccessable once the layout is finished. So naturally those structures had to be done before the tree could go up. Then I could decorate the tree in the middle of the room (which is still cramped) and lift it into place when finished.
The front right corner, mostly obscured by my bed, is the airport.
The runway signs and the tall white on-operating lamps are modern airport toys. The working runway lights are HO scale Model Power globe streetlamps with brass poles. It's very easy to pull the bases off of them and then shorten the pole to whatever length you desire. I also bend the poles 90 degrees to make working wall sconces on O or larger structures. (See the Main Street Station in my Disneyland thread.)
In the hanger is the airplane from the Lionel operating pylon. I use the pylon on my Standard Gauge layout but with a paper model of the R100 rigid airship I built instead of the provided airplane.
I made the "CLE Cleveland Hopkins International Airport" sign with Photoshop. It was printed on regular 20lb paper and then glued behind pieces of clear plastic. The sign is double sided and the frame of it was made using strip styrene "U" channel. The "United Airlines" and "Arrivals/Departures" signs were from the set of airport toys but the silver poles they're attached to were made from strip styrene. The uh, "tunnel" the cars appear to be headed in and out of is my dresser.
Here's another one of my older kitbashes. The main building is a Plasticville Bank. The smaller "wings" are pieces from a K-Line Hardware Store. The water tank was a kit but the smokestacks are booster rockets from a 1/144 scale model of the Space Shuttle!
ONE OUT OF THREE
I call this one the "postwar layout" but in reality all eras are welcome! It's just that with all the Plasticville I tend to run more equipment from the 50's and 60's than anything else. Besides, the Christmas tree with it's wonderful asbestos flocking is a postwar piece in and of itself!
Over on the left front corner I've placed the modern issue Turnpike Tollbooth and some of my favorite diecast vehicles. Accross the tracks are a Hershey's delivery truck and a B and O bus.
The color on this one is a bit hinky but it still looks cool in it's way.
THE COLA WARS!
An entire batallion of fire fighters and police has shown up to prevent a battle between the drivers of the yellow and red Coca Cola truck and the blue Pepsi truck!
Meanwhile the Boy Scouts are far too involved with their campfire ghost stories to worry about soda pop!
Becky between your great modeling/kitbashing and stories you keep us in aww! I love all of your work as does a lot others here.
Life's hard, even harder if your stupid John Wayne
http://rtssite.shutterfly.com/
rtraincollector Becky between your great modeling/kitbashing and stories you keep us in aww! I love all of your work as does a lot others here.
I couldn't agree more with that.^ I wish I had half the energy and determination that Becky has with these projects. I check the threads every chance I get eager to see what she accomplished.
Becky,
Keep up the great work. Seriously, have you considered talking to the folks of CTT? With what you've done, there seems to be a lot of potential for great articles.
Excellent, well done Becky.
FUN WITH A BLACK LIGHT
Before I put it away from Halloween, I thought I'd play around a bit and take some funky photos with the blacklight. No, that towtruck driver isn't secretly transporting Plutonium, that's the reflection of the supercharged streetlamp above under UV light!
Woohoo! Look at that billboard glow!
Seriously though, who builds a hospital next door to a coal fired power plant?????
One of my modified Lionel 4-4-2's in NKP garb doesn't even phase the boys playing in the schoolyard.
The real fun came when I turned everything but the blacklight off. Check that crossbuck on the 154!
By the light of an artificial moon.
Well, hope you enjoy these phunky photos!
Your work is outstanding.
You have a great imagination and hands of gold.
Keep up the good work.
Take Care,
Ralph
Please contact me about getting a picture of your layout--or perhaps more--in Classic Toy Trains.
Thanks,
Roger Carp
Senior Editor
262-796-8776 ext. 253
I must admit that I thought the leading edge of classic layout design was reached long ago until you began posting your work. A one woman revolution. You have a creative mind that has really expanded what can be done with less. I hope you take Rodger's offer.
Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.
Wonderful work. Your pictures are inspiring. I'd love to see an entire article on your work. What I like best is the work is all yours and on a modest budget.
Please!!!!!!!!!! Contact Rodger
Banks, Proud member of the OTTS TCA 12-67310
Thanks guys! I'm working on it! I'm going to need a lot of help getting better photos! And I can't think of anyplace better than this forum to find it!
ONCE UPON A TIME...
I had the ability to work outside at Christmas time as well. I called the display "34th Street" after the movie. In it's final incarnation for Christmas 2002, before I developed health issues had to go on hiatus, there were 40,000 lights and about a metric ton of plywood decorations.
Top to bottom, left to right: 1: Overview of the whole operation which surrounded the house on 3 sides. 2: The back yard featuring an electric garden with a swan swimming on a pond of electric water. 3: Tigger, Pooh and Christopher Robin. 4: Mr. Jingeling, local Christmas legend. 5: My rendition of the Sundblom Coca Cola Santa unpacking a Lionel set for a lucky child. The set included a 392E w/tender, 514R, red 517, green 516 and a yellow 515 plus 2 tunnels. 6: Ready Killowatt. 7: My life-sized Nativity, out front and most prominent of all the displays.
8: The big train with 4-2-0 locomotive, tender with elf and Christmas tree, yellow 512 gondola with Rudolph, Herbie and the Misfit Toys, "Holly Berry Dairy Farms" tanker in chocolate brown and caboose with penguin. There was also a small depot and a crossbuck in this display. 9: Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang celebrate close to the "north pole". 10: The front half of our side lot was dominated by the Sesame Street characters. Big Bird is 7 feet tall and 6 feet long where the majority of my characters were 4 feet tall. 11: Mickey, Minney, Donald< Goofy and Pluto sing carols on the porch by a partridge and some pears in a tree.
Christmas has always been big around here!
Wow! If only I had a fraction of your talent and energy.....
How many sabre saw blades did you wear out on those plywood cutouts? I made a nativity scene once with some pre-printed pictures pasted on plywood and it took me several days and a pack on blades. Did you paint them all yourself?
Thanks!
Believe it or not, an aunt and uncle bought me a jigsaw, a pile of paint and plywood and the plans for the stable as a Christmas gift in 1988! By that time I had already been setting up lots of lights and decorations every year. But it wasn't till that year that I discovered the magic of the jigsaw. The original stable got replaced twice before I came up with this "Roman Ruins" motif. (One memorable year I built the stable out of limbs from a crabapple tree I'd cut down and thatched the roof with pine boughs.) I also added several figures (2 shepherds, drummer boy, camel, big angel) to the creche beyond what the original kit plans made.
After that, it just grew bit by bit every year. While the train started out as just the locomotive (copied from a Carlton Cards ornament if I remember), other sections like the Peanuts, Sesame Street and Mickey and friends were added in their entirety each year. For most of the characters, I sought out comic books, Little Golden Books or coloring books which often give you nice line drawings to work from. Then I'd lay the wood out on the floor and draw each one freehand with a pencil until it looked "enough" like the original art. When I was satisfied, I would go over my pencil drawing with a black marker and prime the piece. The heavy ink lines would show through the primer but erratic pencil marks would not. Then I'd paint them with latex and seal them with spray polyeurethane. Most were on 1/2" unsanded BCX which was cheap and in my budgetary range!
I made Christmas trees out of cereal bowls, a Tori (Japanese garden arch) out of shelving brackets and a snowman out of the heavy ends of a cable reel. If I could, I would! I was even running a "home for wayward Christmas trees" by 2002! Anyone who knew me would rather give me their old natty artificial tree rather than just throw it away!
Jigsaws on the other hand I did throw away! At least 3 of them! I can be a bit impatient and I don't take cr*p from any power tools! The blade is going where I want it to go not where it wants or needs to go! So yeah, I burned out more than a few motors and sent more than a few blades to the trash bin over the years! If it took me more than 15 minutes to cut out a simple shape from 2 foot by 4 foot piece of 1/2" BCX then the saw needed to work faster!
Ahhh, memories. I miss it. Wish I could do it every year. But, it'll just have to keep collecting dust awhile longer.
You say this layout is basicly 50-60 well then you ask kiddingly "
Seriously though, who builds a hospital next door to a coal fired power plant????? " well back then it would not of been thought twice about the effects and would of gone ahead and done it.
looking forward to seeing your work in CTT
Believe it or not, hospitals used to burn coal for heat. There ia an old hospital building in the town where I work that has been turned into an apartment building. It has a tall stack by it to this day.
A LITTLE TEASER
I just wanted to say that the Standard Gauge oval is finished! Trying to get what I used to display inside a 4 by 14 foot oval into this 5 by 5 was a bit tough! I'll get more pictures tomorrow when I have the daylight (sunset) to work with.
Well done Becky,
I'm curious about the sky scrapers in the background. Who made those? Where might I be able to get some of them? Also, I don't recognize the two residential houses in the upper right hand corner. Who made those?
overall Well done Becky, I'm curious about the sky scrapers in the background. Who made those? Where might I be able to get some of them? Also, I don't recognize the two residential houses in the upper right hand corner. Who made those? Thanks, George
LOL
Becky, after I saw your layout photo, I was getting ready to ask about those skyscrapers in the background and then I came across George's question. He beat me to it.
Tell us more about the skyscrapers. I cannot tell if they are actual structures or cardboard background buildings. Also, what is the scale of those skyscrapers. I would kill to have that in HO scale.
Rich
Alton Junction
Ha ha! I knew those would get attention! Well, first off they're 100% 65 pound cardstock. They come from various sources, but this is one of the best for free downloads:
http://skyscrapermodels.us/
Generally speaking, the models of skyscrapers that many fans create are tiny. 1:1200 scale or even smaller. So what I had to do was look for the ones that had the best graphics so they would withstand drastic enlargement. And the only scaling tool I really had available was "how big can I possibly get this and still be able to build a structurally sound model". So early 20th century style granite buildings like the ESB, the Chrysler and 30 Rock leant themselves well to the process. By dividing the original kit into sections or "blocks", I could keep the model stronger.
As a rule I would allow the largest (longest) section of the tower to decide how big the model would turn out. Looking at the Empire State Building, you can see that right in the middle of it's rise there's a long section between the base pieces and the upper sections. Since I wanted the building to be as tall as possible, I actually split that section into 2 parts. One half of it would fit in the print area of an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of cardstock. Giving me a single piece about 10 inches long. Howver it wasn't perfectly fit to the page in length but rather in width, which gave me some overlap. That means I was able to trim the excess and use it as my glue surface behind the face of the tower which in turn gave me a nearly indetectable joint. I also insert blocks at joints like this to strengthen the piece.
So the basic answer to what scale are they is something of anathema. They're not even close to being in scale with each other. Especially if you look to the right and note that the Chrysler building is considerably taller than the ESB!
By the way, did you realize you're NOT looking at a Hellgate Bridge but rather a photograph of one? While it's scaled down size should be a dead giveaway, the similarly shrunken high tension towers attached to the same photo help us to know it's just a lie!
Like practically everything else, all the stations, houses, villas and factories are paper models too. The only notable exception is the red walled, white porticoed, gray roofed reproduction Marx civil war mansion which is lithographed brass. Got that for a song on Ebay in MIB condition! The house to the right of it is an enlarged model of Abraham Lincoln's Springfield Illinois house from www.buildyourownmainstreet.org . The kits there are scaled to HO so I just printed mine 4 times larger. The rest of the structures are spray painted posterboard and the onetwentywhatever style station in front was built in 1995 when I got into standard gauge. Back then I didn't have much available to tell me exactly how big things were so I gleaned the info from the few prescious photos in books like Ron Hollander's All Aboard and very few others. Which is also why the stations, houses and etc were all built to the same scale. Which believe it or not, was the height of the doors on my #33!
Well, here's some more photos!
Looking up (or is it down?) Main Street (or is it Broadway?) past "City Hall" and the Carlisle and Finch factory you can see my two reproduction Paya trolleys fighting their way through traffic.
Here's the reason for the traffic jam! There's a big Christmas parade featuring Civil War reenactors tieing up the only other street in town! These are repro Marx, BMC and other toy soldiers that I hand painted. I like the funky art deco style trees that dot my layout. They scream 1920's!
The pride of the line: the venerable #8 custom painted in two tone blue leads restored freight cars through the possibly excessive amount of signals that exist on this railroad! I also added a big pantograph so the #8 would look more like the 200 series P1a electrics that once ran out of the Cleveland Union Terminal to the Linndale Yard which was just down the street from my house. In the right foreground you can see some of the flowers I made using unraveled rope, green sawdust and bits of sponges. BTW the lamps, semaphore and clock are MTH while the big signal bridge in the background is Aristo Craft. You can also see my gigantic power house looming in the background.
FLIPPING OVER TO THE ROOM NEXT DOOR:
I've been experimenting with my camera while I try to come up with some "Magazine Quality" photos. What do you think?
I just won that 2018 on Ebay! Cleaned, lubed and E-Unit serviced for 40 bucks!
So are they CTT worthy? Seriously, I'm looking for all the help I can get! I'll take ALL thoughts and suggestions!
Penny Trains Ha ha! I knew those would get attention! Well, first off they're 100% 65 pound cardstock. They come from various sources, but this is one of the best for free downloads: http://skyscrapermodels.us/ Generally speaking, the models of skyscrapers that many fans create are tiny. 1:1200 scale or even smaller. So what I had to do was look for the ones that had the best graphics so they would withstand drastic enlargement. And the only scaling tool I really had available was "how big can I possibly get this and still be able to build a structurally sound model". So early 20th century style granite buildings like the ESB, the Chrysler and 30 Rock leant themselves well to the process. By dividing the original kit into sections or "blocks", I could keep the model stronger. As a rule I would allow the largest (longest) section of the tower to decide how big the model would turn out. Looking at the Empire State Building, you can see that right in the middle of it's rise there's a long section between the base pieces and the upper sections. Since I wanted the building to be as tall as possible, I actually split that section into 2 parts. One half of it would fit in the print area of an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of cardstock. Giving me a single piece about 10 inches long. Howver it wasn't perfectly fit to the page in length but rather in width, which gave me some overlap. That means I was able to trim the excess and use it as my glue surface behind the face of the tower which in turn gave me a nearly indetectable joint. I also insert blocks at joints like this to strengthen the piece. So the basic answer to what scale are they is something of anathema. They're not even close to being in scale with each other. Especially if you look to the right and note that the Chrysler building is considerably taller than the ESB!
Thank you so much for that explanation and that source.
You are unquestionably one of the most creative of all the modelers on all of the Trains forums.
I have been using Walthers Instant Horizons and Instant Buildings in combination on my HO scale layout, but they don't hold a candle to these skyscrapers.
Thanks again.
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Oh Becky, it looks real nice and I’m inspired to post a thread of what I’m doing as well. I’ve started mine as well last week, but unfortunately I have overdone it on size and besides the Lionel trains, I have all porcelain houses so I’m reluctant to post here in Classic Toy Trains Forums. I just need some of your artistic talent so mine will look as good.
I've always believed that if you're having fun it will show in your work. So let us see how much fun you're having!
DISNEYLAND GETS READY FOR "OPENING DAY"!
Here it is! And here we go!
The furniture has been moved, and today the track was finally laid out so I could decide wether or not the plan was going to work. And guess what? IT DIDN'T! As usual! So, I modified the plan by cutting 17 inches off the left end and shuffling a few things around. 7 days left to go!
TICK TICK TICK...
DISNEYLAND!
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