I finally got my hands on one of those Bachmann Spectrum Metropolitan building. Now I’ve seen a lot of versions of this built, from straight forward out of the box, to multi kitbashed like Rod Stewart’s MEGA city.
Have any of you built this kit? Any special paint jobs, interior lighting done. Did any of you make it into a large flat or double its height? I would like to see what you guys have done.
My layout doesn’t warrant a building like that though I would like to build it just for the sake of seeing what I could do with it but that being said here’s a link to Station Agent custom models he’s done that particular building ad some others and his work is pretty impressive. Not sure if you’ve seen it or not but maybe you could get some ideas from him.
A couple of views of how I employed the Bachmann Metropolitan structure as a background, less than full thickness, building in the city scene on my layout.
Ron, I’ll add that one has to be careful in how they employ such large buildings, or for that matter creating any urban scene. Very tall buildings need to be surrounded by only somewhat shorter ones or they will look distinctly out of character in the scene. Other aspects to consider are how much a part of your layout you want the urban scene to occupy and just how much money you have available to execute it. Urban scenes tend to take up a lot of space (mine is 3’x11’) and suck up a lot of cash. So…my advice would be to acquire as many large kits as you can afford over an extended period of time before seriously considering any design for the urban scene, i.e. make it one of your final construction phases of your layout, not the first. [;)]
CNJ831
I did a couple of that series of buildings, stwo being the one you have. I placed one in my downtown Oklahoma City scene and did a little modification and it fit in pretty nice. Full dimension, not “slimmed down” or anything. It is at the front. The other was sectioned into two semi flats with different coloring and placed in the back against the wall.
There was also a hotel that I latched on to and I did a few mods on it and put it in place. Still have one hotel and one office building in the box waiting for a place to be “planted”. However, Oklahoma City is already pretty full and that is the only large city on the layout.
Bob
I bought the five building set and built this building straight from the box. It is a very nice building and all five buildings make a very nice city scene. The footprint once you add the sidewalks, alleys and streets becomes quite large. I used the same gray and green colors as the altered building introduced by Allegheny. Originally I had an elevated subway line running through the city scene and it was quite a crowd pleaser. One move later the city scene will most likely be atop a subway / union station scene. The overall height scales out pretty nicely with the remaining bachman buildings.
John
I have 4 of the 5 tall guys, I remember glueing 1 corner at a time because they weren’t square but other than that they turned out pretty cool.
What I want to know is did they sell the sidewalk as a seperate item? I have recently used up my leftovers to finish several kits by City Classics and Chooch Ultra-Scale and it’s pretty awesome sidewalk, better than what’s out there now (I use a lot of the Pikestuff for smaller DPM, etc).
I don’t know of Bachmann having any sidewalks, but Walther’s does have a sidewalk system. If you go to Walthers.com and type in sidewalk into the search, you get quite a few choices.
The sidewalks were specific to the kits (possibly an older Walthers’ item. I find that Smalltown sidewalks (item 699-7000 from RIX are good but can get pricey if you need a lot of them. I have blended them into the City Scenes sidewalks by shimming them up to the same height.
I am not impressed with the Walthers sidewalks, too narrow for city sidewalks. They do have curb side storm drain inserts. Really designed to complement the streets.
As to the OP I have built most of the CityScenes buildings and managed to use up almost all the sidewalks for my three block city. Look nice with some help like cracks or built-up side to use a smaller curve on the corners. The Metro Tower will be a bit tricky to build given all the corners and relatively thin plastic. I have yet to build it, and will paint it prior to assembly. BTW the walls with the windows can be swapped to the other side to change the handiness of the model. Just trim the ridge on the base.
Photographs of these buildings can be found on my layout web site (Layout Photos and Structures Page 2)
Alan
You fellows have done a nice job deploying these large buildings. It’s another series that I wish would come to N scale, but was scrapped due to low sales in HO. It would be nice if some of the manufacturers would treat the N scale market as its own entity, and not as the red haired step child of HO.
As has been noted in the posts above, these structures eat up a lot room on a layout, room that most modelers simply don’t have… unless they are working in a smaller scale. Aside from the broader opportunities that exist on N scale home layouts, consider N trak as a possibility… Those set ups are typically huge, and there’s a lot of great urban modules out there that could benefit from large downtown buildings like this.
But alas… [sigh]
There was an article either in N Scale Magazine or N Scale Railroading a number of years ago about converting the Bachmann building to N scale through some clever reworking of the window and door trims. But now it’s hard to even find the HO version to monkey around with…
Lee
Hi Lee,
I am myself in the way to construct a town for my Nscale layout; in fact it’s a very slow construction progress beside other parts of my layout.
Only a very few structures are build and I just collect them now, to build the town later, because as mentionned earlier in this post, it’s time consuming and expensive.
As you say there is very few big buildings in Nscale and it’s sad to see N scale considered like a joke by some manufacturer especialy here in Europe even if the things seems to change now.
But about building a town in Nscale, you can do a huge one in a small space, mine is build on a peninsula and the trackwork run through it and around it.
A row of big buildings serve as a divider and a small hill at the end of the peninsula se
Thanks, Marc.
Yes, I’m aware of the Lunde Studios buildings, and CMR. In fact, I really like CMR as they are mostly based on prototypes in Baltimore, where I’m from, and where they’re based. If I’m not mistaken, one of their models is based on the Standard Oil Building on St. Paul St., which housed the headquarters of the Western Maryland for many years!
Unfortunately, neither of these offerings are what you’d call “mass produced” so the cost is pretty prohibitive. But for an iconic building in N scale, they really are hard to beat.
I’d love to see some pictures of your cityscape…
Lee
Actually for their size and appearance the N-scale CMR buildings aren’t that expensive. Three of the Lunde N-scale buildings have been discontinued according to their web site. The Lunde structures are actually fairly inexpensive, especially given the prices on eBay for Bachmann CityScenes kits.
Alan