This weekend I started a major rebuilding project on our HO layout.
The residential area on the layout is being completely redone with new streets, sidewalks, houses, school, and an orange grove. The layout is set in Southern California during the late 1950s.
Below are some progress photos.
The red and green houses are old Suydam tract house kits that I found on eBay over the years. The school is a kitbash that started from a Busch Cinema. The fruit stand is a new kit I just got from JV models, I altered it a bit. The brown house was already on the layout and is a Suydam Brown Bungalow. The stucco building behind the school was also already on the layout and is a Suydam Mission Style Station altered into a church.
As you can see there is lots left to do…finish the buildings, painting, landscaping, details, etc…
Airbrushed the streets with Grimy Black this morning. I’m waiting for the paint to fully cure before I glue the streets down. And after that I’ll add some road stripes, stop signs, etc…
I also started construction of another house (Alpine Division’s Dr. Whyte’s House).
In some of these photos you can see the old driveways and streets (painted black). These will all be covered up with ground covering.
What kind of Landscaping would suburban Southern California circa late 1950s?
I googled Orange County 1950s (going by your location), but the images that turned up didn’t give a great overview of the area back then. I remember there were lots of TV Sitcoms filmed around suburban LA in that era such as Leave It to Beaver, Mr Ed, and so on, but what will be your take on it?
There’s a 1950s development in the San Juan Capistrano area called Los Amigos that I have been researching. Online photos of this development have been helpful in planning the overall look I’m going for.
Spent the weekend making orange trees. They are cut from sponges and have skewer trunks. I spray painted them but haven’t put any foliage or oranges on them yet. I also added some ground cover and test fit Wig Wag signals.
Next on the list is to finish airbrushing the sidewalks. I didn’t like the way brush painting looked.
I worked one summer in a California grove (apricots, not oranges, but that shouldn’t matter) back then. The first thing I noticed is your grove looks park like, not grove like. The fruit growers crowded their trees as closely as they could. There was barely any room between them. They even used special tractors with sweeping fenders to keep the tree branches out of the machinery.
You might consider doubling up on the number of trees in each row.
Other than that, it looks like 50s California. Nice work.
Don’t get me wrong; you’ve done a good job but thinking of 1950’s tract houses makes me think of:
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes, all the same.
There’s a green one, and a yellow one,
And a pink one, and a blue one,
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky,
And they all look just the same.
By the way, I think you will find that the split-windshield Volkswagen bus is just a little anachronistic for the 1950s. According to my information the first VW Type 2s – Vans, Transporters, Microbuses, whatever you want to call them – were imported in very limited numbers as early as 1959 but really didn’t take off in popularity until 1962 or 1963.
I’ve spent a great deal of time in the San Joaquin Valley in California and like another poster mentioned you may want to double the amount of Orange Trees in your orchard. Growers really pack them close together and you may also want to see if you can model something called a “smudge pot”—used to burn oil during freezing weather to help prevent freeze damage to citrus.
I like what you have done with that area. I was going to plan a neighborhood a while back & when I started laying out lot sizes, I couldn’t believe the amount of space just part of a city block will take up. Your streets, lots, boulevards, & sidewalks look nicely done! I also like the different grass tones as well.
The info I have is that in 1959 the number of imported units was about 6,500; I couldn’t tell you what year they were first imported but my understanding is that prior to that 1959 model year total imports for the microbus was less than 3,000 units.
I owned a 1968 microbus that began falling apart almost immediately upon leaving the dealership in San Berdoo, Calif; I will admit that I would probably purchase a VW before I would purchase a Chrysler Motors anything but I don’t intend on ever owning another one period!
Your scene is really beginning to take shape and looks very nice. As a resident of Southern California all my life, I can add a few more suggestions:
It gets hot here in the summer. Few homes had air conditioning in the 1950’s so most houses were landscaped with large shade trees that would often dwarf the houses (I’m looking at a monstrous pecan tree in my back yard right now). The Southern California climate allows many different species of trees to grow so many trees are imported (palm, eucalyptus, pine and various fruit bearing trees to name a few). Keep in mind that these imported trees can grow here but most cannot reproduce here. Thus, varieties like palms must always be imported and always appear in some form of purposely landscaped area. Even the few you see growing in the middle of nowhere were planted by a person.
Southern California gets very little rain. Few homes had automatic sprinklers in the 1950’s so most lawns showed evidence of this lack of water. You might want to add some yellowed grass material to your lawns. Varied patches of yellow in an otherwise late summer green lawn would be most accurate. Coiled hoses attached to hose bibs on the sides of the houses might be another great detail. Lengths of small diameter solder could be used to create such hoses. A sprinkler head attached to the end of a hose could also be modeled using optic fibres to represent the spraying water. Spray a little clear gloss on the grass around the sprinkler head and it would definitely look like the lawn was being watered.
The Southern California climate allows lots of outdoor activity year round. Add lots of residential figures, especially kids playing outdoors. Large field games too big for a single yard were often played out in the residential streets. You could add a bunch of kids harassing a driver for interrupting their game.&nb
It’s been a really useful resource in trying to replicate not only the trains, but the communities, vehicles, etc…contained in the movie. It is full of that 1950s idealized world image.
Here’s a still that I’ve been using as reference for basic landscaping:
One other common item I see missing is yard fencing. Southern Californians have always preferred a little privacy in their back yards. Thus, wood fences five to six feet high were and still are quite common around the back and sides of each lot. Short fence sections typically connect the front end of each side fence to some point on the side of the house or garage, usually toward the front of the structure. Gates are often included in these short fence sections. Fences may or may not exist between the house and the detached garage. The Walthers wood fence kit looks about right for such fencing. Chain link was sometimes used but this was typically augmented by tall hedges to create a visual barrier. Fences between adjacent front yards were less common.
