I have been playing with card stock models for a while now. The layout needed a passenger station and I located an HO scale image for Knox College’s “Old Main” building. It was selectively compressed and not made to plan. The structure is printed surfaces over foam core with a scratchbuilt canopy:

It looks OK in person and in pictures.

This area is not finished. There is a lot of other work that needs to be done as well as weathering…

The Penske truck and DHL van started as plain vehicles that I made decals for. Enjoy.

Sounds corny? I have had few people on my layout over the years basically because they are hard to paint. Enter eBay… a vendor had 100 figures for under five bucks. They are 1/100th scale which close to HO scale, and they work out just fine. I’d always thought that the regular HO figures were a bit big in some cases and after a few quick measurements, my old HO people were all six footers and over! They worked out well enough that I have ordered more of them.

Anyway- these were already painted and I dusted them with black chalk to bring up the details and kill the shine. They are not front line figures, but are great for areas that are arms-length. Here is the first blast of people:

Originally I read this about John Allen’s experience taking pictures of Cliff Grandt’s locomotives to see if they were lifelike enough. It was a side bar in Lynn Westcott’s book on the Gorre & Daphetid Railroad. John would take pictures and show them to Cliff to see where he could improve his modeling skills.

While I am not going for a level of detail that Cliff Grandt was, I do like to use a camera to spot potential flaws in my methods and models. For example- in the picture below, I can see on the bridge that I am working on that there are grey tabs that I will need to cut off before I paint it and detail it further:

It still will need its road surface, walkways, and rails, but the tabs stood out to me. On the shot below, the buildings were not my concern as much as the hinges on the truck and the front of the van. It needs a license plate and a few other things to spruce it up:

In the last pic, the leading edge of the second building on the left needs to have the paper facing re-applied. The shallow relief building on the right is a stand-in, and whatever I replace it with needs to be a lesser scale. For the buildings in the read (both foam core with a fascia applied)- I need to do something with the lighting other than the available room lights before I take any serious pictures. The sidewalk is not painted, and I need a shallow building on the immediate right side (don’t know what just yet). The van on the right needs a license plate and is not good enough for a close up picture. Naturally- people would improve the shot a lot. I have some on order!

I have found a nice product that is a good representation for asphalt. It takes weathering very well, and is glued down well with Elmer’s or Walther’s Goo (which is what I use). It can be easily cut with scissors or an X-acto blade. Some of these pictures show it weathered and some unweathered. Since it is foam, it is impervious to water and nicks and dings or errant glue can be easily covered up with a large Sharpie marker.

If you are using a magnetic coupler, you will have to be cautious of the pin height, and maybe bend it up a little. As for me, I am removing my coupler pins and adding detail air hoses in their place- I could care less about automatic coupling. The height relationship was tested by rolling scale Mini Metals automobiles over the grade crossings, and they roll very smoothly- almost with prototypical amount of bumping over the tracks. I am pleased!

Here is the product with chalk weathering...

Here is the product un-weathered

Here is my effort at the rail crossing. Not hard to do.

Another view of the crossing

And yet another view...

I have started another scale structures group on Yahoo for HO Scale. It was borne out of a frustration on another thread when I asked a legitimate question about lighting buildings with LED’s. Anyway- I was booted off! I’ve since re-applied and am awaiting re-instatement.

Guess that I’ll just have to keep off to the side and be a lurker- and build another group where questions can be asked and answered without the fear of recompense.