I’ve been trying to work my way through the back log of model train buildings I received for Christmas LAST year. I’m pleased with my results so far. I had an HO scale model train set growing up, and loved it. My dad built this cool, huge table for it (about the size of a pool table). When it was folded down for the train set, it had two big loops and was painted green. I could place my buildings out there and run the train. We even had little trees and snow to set it up for Christmas. When you folded it up out of the way (because we had no room in that house for something that large year round), it had a dry erase board on the back side so when it was up against the wall my brother and I could use the board. I pretty much just got the buildings, glued them together, and put them out. They pre-dye the plastic for these buildings to give them some color, but they never look that great.

So, when I decided to get back into the hobby as an adult, I decided to scale down to N scale so it would take even less room, and focus more on the detail: painting the buildings, using materials to make a realistic landscape. Ian got me the set for Christmas two years ago, I got a bunch of buildings last Christmas, and Ian and I built a table for it several months back.

For the longest time I just had the one building finished that came with the set, but I’ve cranked out three others now. Here are some pics for you to enjoy.

This is a high level view of how everything looks now.

This is one of the new buildings. It was actually a set of two identical buildings for a “U.S. Customs Office”. That was boring, so I did the two as differently as I could. This is probably a small shop in the downtown area of a small rural town in America, sometime in the last century (I don’t know for sure though, you’ll have to ask the owner). Perhaps a flower, coffee, or antique shop. I’ve made some of the images clickable to the full size versions to see the detail.

Here’s the main street. When I have it fairly flushed out with buildings I’ll go through and create the complete sidewalk (it’s this funky stuff that is a long roll of what looks like black tar, you cut a piece out and put gravel on it for roads like I’ve done, or paint it grey and crack/cut it for sidewalk). You can see the duplicate of the earlier building at the top.

Here’s my latest one. It’s an abandoned building (the stickers that came with it said guitar factory, how odd!). I like how it turned out. I used a painting technique here to a great extent (and actually on all the buildings to some degree) that I picked up from my friend Vic called drybrushing. You get the tip of the brush wet with paint, then rub it on a towel or cloth to get most of the paint out. Then, you brush random strokes all over the surface, even grinding the brush into the surface to get the tips splayed out (kind of ruins the brush for everything but drybrushing, so you usually keep one brush dedicated to this). The result is you get faint hints of the color everywhere. It’s common to do black and white to age something. You can really tell it on the grey roof here.