"Heritage" HO Structure Kit

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

I wanted a small frame church for the small coal-mining town of Darwin (Virginia) on my HO Winneshiek & Western Railroad. There are a number of choices out there. Walther’s Cornerstone has a “Cottage Grove Church” with nice proportions, but it always seems strange to me to have to work to make plastic look like wood when one can build something out of actual wood. B.T.S. also has a nice-looking church kit, and they have good kits with modern laser-cut wood. I was also aware that there had been a church kit made years ago by Historical Scale Miniatures (HSM Models).

This interest was rumbling around in my mind when I went to the Great Scale Model Train Show in Timonium, MD on October 10. A dealer there had one of those old HSM kits for the Bodie Church. This kit is modeled after a Methodist Church in the ghost town of Bodie, CA. Photos of the prototype church can be found at: http://bodie.com/tour/church.asp While the kit was originally sold for $6.50, it is long out of production and they were asking $30.00. This price is still less than the list price for either the Cornerstone or BTS kits. I decided to try my hand with this old kit.

The paperwork in the kit indicates that this model was originally released in 1965. The kit consisted of: Two sheets of 1/16" thick scribed wood, a bundle of stripwood, cardboard to be cut out for window frames and such, pressboard for floors and roof, a roll of the “Campbell” gummed shingles, and two pages of plans/instructions. There’s no lasercut anything here. The kit was supposed to contain a bell, but it did not. I had an old locomotive bell in the box that works nicely.

I took my time with construction. I was abl

2

How about placing a resistor in series with the bulb to reduce the voltage? Not smart enough to tell you size, but would need to know the voltage being used.

3

That sure builds up into a nice looking structure - thanks for including a photo of the box because that looked familiar even though the name of the company initially rang no bells (no pun intended). Back in those days a “kit” often involved the manufacturer essentially doing your shopping for you of the raw parts you’d need and supplying the drawing, with everything else left up to you. Nowadays maybe we’d call it “directed scratchbuilding.”

Dave Nelson

4

Oh, a P.S.:

The photos of the original church show what appears to be a lightning rod atop the bell tower with a round insulator at the base. I cut off a pin and mounted it to simulate this. I thought about wiring the lightning rod to an electrode directly above the pulpit - That would be some positive encouragement for the Pastor to be sure to speak carefully. [angel]

Bill

5

Paint the church red and I would feel present at Clint Eastwood’s “High Plains Drifter” movie-set town Lago, filmed on the south shore of Mono Lake, itself not far south of Bodie.

Nice job assembling the “ready to scratchbuild” kit.

Mark