While reading my newest MR issue, I found a small ad for a company that sells these buildings in kit form:
Has anyone bought and built one of these? I’m interested in feedback as I’m considering them for my ‘downtown business district’ on my layout. Their website is http://www.custommodelrailroads.com/citystructures.html .
Don Z.
I’d be interested in these too, although, I used to be really bad growing up putting things like this together. I’d use too much glue everywhere.
I’ll be trying tonight with a train station my dad sent me for xmas. I’m 24 now and am nervous bout putting a model together. how pathetic 
I have bought two kits from them but haven’t got around to assembling them yet so I can’t speak to the degree of difficulty. I opened up the station concourse kit and can see that it is a different kind of kit than any styrene kit that I am used to working with. The parts are all clear acrylic which obviously have to be painted. The parts are flexible as opposed to rigid plastic in more conventional kits. I’m guessing that the walls are to be laminated to given them stiffness.
The kits certainly are good looking structures and there isn’t a lot available in tall urban structures. The only other choices I’m aware of is kitbashing or modulers.
I bought the 130’ turntable & the 6-stall roundhouse from them. They were oth fairly easy to put together. The turntable went together faster than I anticipated and worked without alot of sanding and repositioning of the bridge. On the roundhouse I installed lights and ran the wires inside the small plastic cofee stirrers making them look like conuit. I made a shade over the bulb out of .020" styrene and used some reflective muffler tape on the underside of the shade to give off more light. Tweet.
Guy’s;
They do look great! Can anyone tell me if the windows and door frames are separate castings from the walls? I would hate to have to paint all those windows on the stucture as opposed to spray painting them off the building.
They are a nice addition to the Bachman large downtown buildings from a few years ago.
thanks, Chris
Really nice!
Especially good to have this option now that Bachmann Spectrum buildings are becoming harder to find and some have been fetching high prices on ebay.
I called the company and talked with one of the owners. He told me that the 3 buildings in the picture; the parts are cut from 1/16" thick white acrylic. Any brick or stone block lines are etched into the acrylic.
Here’s some good news! The windows are all on one piece of acrylic and the sheet laminates to the back of the exterior wall, so you don’t have a zillion windows and pieces to mess with. I’m thinking really hard about trying one of these kits now.
The man I talked with told me that he can build one of these buildings including paint and weathering in about 8 hours. One major warning: DO NOT USE ALCOHOL ON THESE KITS! He said the alcohol in a wash or paint will attack the acrylic and cause crazing of the acrylic - a very bad thing…
Don Z.
Now only if he would sell them constructed I’d be interested then.
You may want to try and contact them directly and see if they won’t sell you a “RTR” building. Some companies like this offer that service. You will definately pay a premium though.
Has anyone made more modern-looking high-rises? I’m in N scale and I’m trying to find a way to construct an office building out of a stack of N scale rolling stock jewelboxes. Each box is one scale story high.
Not pathetic at all. Be nervous (from experience), go carefully, make a nice model (without too much glue) Gain immense satisfaction and some admiration (post pics of your models here)… you’ve learnt. That is impressive. Not learning is sad. Keep not learning may be pathetic.
I repeat… learning from your mistakes is impressive.
I have always been curious about the materials that are used for architectural models. Some of the models I have seen are really nice (and fetches a nice price on eBay). Has anyone had experience with this?
I’ve seen soem of the CMR structures assembled at their table at the Timonium train show. VERY VERY nice. Don’t have any can can’t comment on difficulty level, but finished they look GREAT. If you want more modern high-rise structures, there is a company near me, whose name I cannot recall, that makes modern skyscrapers using a similar technique with acrylics.
–Randy