Structures—temporary or get the job done now?
Mike sez…
by Mike Schafer & Bill Navigato
hose of us striving for a realistic, reasonably “fin- ished” (ha, ha) layout are prob- ably going to want to civilize it — at least in some locations — with various structures. At the very least, chances are you want depots and station facilities; in fact, I’ll bet those are among the first buildings established on a layout. Thinking back to my S- gauge American Flyer days in the 1950s, I had a whole bunch of Plasticville buildings as well as Flyer-issued structures for my succession of layouts. (I love that No. 766 animated Guilford Sta- tion where, through a vibration system, “passengers” boarded and detrained from a passenger car.) Those structures were part of the ritual of periodically set-
T
ting up my Flyer system du jour on either my bedroom floor or the dining room floor. (We didn’t have a dining room table, so there was ample floor space in that room.) When I built my first “permanent” Flyer layout on benchwork in our basement, circa 1960, I glued all the Plasticville structures togeth- er, and I tossed away their origi- nal boxes. (Looking back, that might have been a mistake, see- ing how collectible vintage Plas- ticville has become.) At this time, I began building structures out of cardstock and/or thin wood. I en- visioned what I wanted and where it would fit best, and then I built it to the necessary specs. Fast-forward to my present,
Mike’s world Nail boxes? What nail boxes? That’s State Line Tower! A key element of Mike Schafer’s HO-scale Illinois & St. Louis is his modeling of the famous prototype 29-diamond junction at Hammond, Indiana. As the largest mechanically operated interlocking plant in the world, the prototype tower was unusually long —approximately 100 feet. There was no model of this huge tower that even came close to the prototype, so Mike hastily placed a pair of cardboard boxes as a “temporary” fix to the situation — a ten-year temporary fix as it turned out. — Mike Schafer photo
78 RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN
out-of-control, 1,600-square-foot Illinois & St. Louis layout that’s going to eat structures as fast as I buy them — or build them. I’ve al- ready acquired quite a collection of structures, mostly Walthers — and mostly unbuilt and stored in their original boxes. Some of my finished structures were built by a fellow who eventually decided that maybe Model Railroading Is not so Fun after all and went on to other things (in this case, guns. Hmmm…). The assembled build- ings get moved around a lot, so I can figure out where they might work best. The coke plant is now at its third location.
Alas, there are some structures I’m going to need that must rep- resent specific prototypes, or I’m going to lose the feel of some of the landmark locations I’m modeling in HO scale. In other words, they are going to have to be custom- built, either by me or by someone who will fall for my “Tom Sawyer” method of model-building; e.g., “Man, wouldn’t replicating the Rock Island depot at Chillicothe [Illinois] on my layout be neat?! You say you love building struc- tures? Oh, hey! … I bet you’d have
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