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!
Becky
Trains, trains, wonderful trains. The more you get, the more you toot!
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
Becky,
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.
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
Your work is outstanding.
You have a great imagination and hands of gold.
Keep up the good work.
Take Care,
Ralph
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!
Excellent, well done Becky.
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.
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.
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.
Life's hard, even harder if your stupid John Wayne
http://rtssite.shutterfly.com/
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!
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!
Well done Becky, good modeling. Be sure and post photos of your Christmas layouts.
George
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!
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.
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!
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