Jordan Products make a line of fine detailed styrene plastic kits. Mostly cars from 1914 to 50s. IN particular, their 360-244 1940s transit bus would be a natural for your city scene, they also have a 360-229 1934 21 passenger bus that would be a good school bus. I could not find a web site for them; this is the Walthers listing of their line:
Resin Unlimited makes some early 50s Seagrave fire trucks; they are not listed in Walthers any more, but still have a website http://personal.pitnet.net/jasond/ruprod01.htm. If no longer in Walthers who knows about availablity any more??
Though I’m an N scaler, if it weren’t for Mini Metals I’d be in trouble when it comes to 1950s era vehicles…
If you’re interested, I’ve got a friend that’s getting out of the hobby that has a “boat load” of 1950s era HO cars and trucks that he’d probably be willing to let you have a good deal on just to get rid of them. Let me know if you’re interested.
You have already answered the questions asked about the nymber of cars you will need and putting obstacles in your own way…
I have a thought which sort of combines these two issues.
I had to learn this myself. (So I learnt it the hard way [sigh])
When a plan needs a theoretical number of anything it is easy to think “Right! I must get [all of]that/them”. This is wrong… especially when it comes to things for the layout that won’t be needed until much later in the project.
You won’t need to fully populate your streets with cars until you have built the streets. Diabolically obvious isn’t it?
[banghead]
YUP! that’s why I spend so much time shifting round boxes of stuff that I will have a use for… eventually… [8)]
The advantage - that I’m still lerning - of not getting all the bits up front is… are{
the cost gets spread.
there’s new stuff coming out all the time
I can get bits here and there at train shows (still have to watch how much I get “in advance”.
I end up with a greater variety of bits.
Unless you want your streets full of clones and all the messing about of making them I don’t think that home casting is the way to go… especially if you want half decent glazing.
Yoe can do some doubling up on things like trucks … where a truck will be nose into a doorway you can cut it into two bits crossways and get the other end coming out of a different doorway…
Well, for whatever it is worth, I bought a lot of 9 IMEX trucks on eBay for $33 (including freight) - came out to about $3.60 a truck.
Okay mix of trucks from the 1940s or so - two Peterbilts 280s, three Fords F5s, two International VCOF-190 Cabovers and two International KB-8s (as far as I have been able to identify them).
IMO they don’t look too shabby - you can see how they look in the thread below:
On the other hand, after an initial outlay for the cost of the mold rubber and urethane, you can reproduce many parts, not just vehicles. Someone demonstrated this on your recent thread about resin car kits by detailing one set of car parts and then using them as masters for mold making. It would be worth it if you foresee yourself doing more molding and casting than just these vehicles.
UKGuy had a tutorial a while back showing how to replicate vehicles with latex.
Life-Like “Scenemaster” cars might work for you, check the Walthers website. They make (or made) some 1940’s sedans that would be good for your layout’s era.
It is not the same as making back up copies. With real back up copies, you are only using the back up with the original disk fails. In this case, the plan is to use the copies concurrently with the originals.
The Scene-master coupes are pretty good, they more or less resemble 1949-1950 Mercury Coupes (according to my copies of 'Cars of the Fabulous ‘50s’), although the details are not quite exact in that regard On Sale Today!. The other Scene-master ‘American car’ set (2 color sets are available), well, they look like 1953ish, but 1953 What I’m not entirely sure - bury these babies in parking lots, inside garages, or in the background as they are a bit too toy-like. One more thing about the Coupes - they are the default load on the Life-like TTX[!] bi-level auto-carrier (and apparently there is a way to convert them to 4-door Sedans, as Walthers offers one as a 4 door taxi).
The reason I am babbling on about these vehicles is that I the cool coupes set and plan to use them in modeling a small Automobile Boxcar loading scene (which, if you are modeling mid-1950s or so you can still get away with boxcars) - I also have a cool book ‘New Car Carriers 1910-1998 Photo Album’, with a really interesting picture of new 1954 buicks & Internation P/U in 2 bi-levels (similar to the one that Life-like offers, except instead of a railing on the top of the sides, there is a solid girder), in some odd facility (there’s a large corrugated garage behind them - one roll-up door opened and showing a street behind, w/ some sort of canopy to the side, and then residental buildings (houses & apartments) right across the street from the canopy - it’s actually kind of a bizarre facility layout when you think about it, so you can use bi-levels by 1954 also.
Of course, I am assuming you will be modeling your freight crews unloading some shiny new automobiles at the yard for a local dealership, correct? [:P]
And since you have a close-in background, you will be using well-placed mirrors to displ
They come in several different roads including my fallen flag (Frisco)–freq. on ebay for varyingly good deals. You can check the Walther’s catalog or website to see which varieties might appeal to you.
