Is it just me or is it really hard to find buildings to do a modern city layout?
jjryan,
There are really modern buildings in the new Walthers HO catalog. ( I hope you are in HO ) . There have been articles in MR magazine on easy scratch building of modern skyscrapers . Also, not all city buildings are new. Still lots of early 1900’s style buildings around in cities next to the very modern ones. There are lots of kits and modular parts to make these older buildings. You can do a search of these forums and check with your local hobby shop for more ideas and information.
Ray – Great Northern fan.
I’m actually converting from my HO layout 5 years ago to N scale now to to room issues. With the help from readers on these boards I realized I don’t have enough room to do a good HO scale layout. so I’m doing the hollow core door layout on N scale. Starting from scratch. I’m not good at building models so will probably try and buy as much prebuilt as I can or pay some fellow modelers who enjoy doing it to assemble my buildings for me.
I have the 2006 Walthers catalog. I’ll have to check out the 07 once I get ready to start up here in a few months after I have no more credit card debt.
I’m a new N-scale convert from HO too. A few weeks ago, I stacked a bunch of Roundhouse rolling stock jewel boxes on top of each other, and got my 1:160 ruler to measure them, and found out they’re about a scale 10’ high each. That got me thinking, I can use this to make a nice N scale office building! I haven’t made it yet, as my layout is still under construction, but it’s something to think about.
I also would like to see more modern buildings. Perhaps I should make more architect friends 
Yes, JJ, I’m afraid that you are essentially correct. Both in HO and N there is very little in the way of buildings of truly modern (post WWII) steel-n-glass construction. However, N has at least a few examples offered by European manufacturers (see the latest Walthers).
The best large, relatively modern (1920’s-40’s), urban structures to be offered in decades were the HO Bachmann series of City Scene kits, which built into very large, modern, downtown buildings that were up to about a dozen stories tall (around 16"-18" high in HO). Unfortunately, they were priced too high for the marketplace at the time and sold poorly, going out of production within a year or two. At the end of their run there was a terrific “fire sale” of the remaining kits, selling for only about $0.20 on the dollar. These are still seen on eBay from time to time today but now generally command fairly high prices.
CNJ831
Kato has a few modern office buildings in N. Pretty pricey though. I might just callenge myself to make my own.
Somebody just released an HO model of a modern Arco/AM/PM based on one of Pelle Soeburg’s scratchbuilt models. It looks really good. That’s what drives me nuts the most is things like gas stations which change fairly regularly.
You can always have multiple gas station signs and replace them with each other when the price of gas goes up, down and up again