Some of the Classic Toy ‘O’ layouts feature multi-story buildings. Are yours home-made or purchased? What are they made of and, if bought, what was your source? As always, many thanks.
Not sure how many stories your want. The Ameritowne buildings OGR sells feature 2 to 3. The ones with 3 I know are easily expandable height wise if theres a need to go higher. They feature a cut on the backside to act as a guide to remove a floor. Such as the storefront portion. You could find the complete buildings at shows for around 30 dollars. The fronts and sides sold seperately run around 15. I found it best to buy complete buildings and use whats leftover for other projects. I have no experience with them but some of the ready made MTH buildings are multi storied and can be expanded as well. Most of the taller buildings on my layout are either flats or only feature 2 sides and are against a wall.
Hi traindaddy1
Buildings can be easily made if necessary from foam core board ( war gamers use the material a lot ) and card or balsa wood, you can finish them in a realistic fashion if you wish using flat acrylic hobby paints or building sheet brick card.
Or you could use full gloss acrylic paint if the toy look is your thing, must be acrylic paint if using foam core board.
It takes building a couple of buildings to get the techniques right but once you have, any building any size becomes possible.
You should be able to get commercially made buildings of several brands from your local model train supplier if that is the way you prefer to go.
regards John
Plasticville made an apartment building that was two story, with add a floor(single levels) features allowing you to make it as high as you would like, over four floors and it may look like a tower compared to other buildings on your layout.
Other companies have made some two story buildings like K-Line, mainly houses.
Lee F.
MTH has real nice 2 story buildings. I have the bar with blinking light, beer sign and the Fly fishing store, both with fire esczpe, cost about 35 bucks each.
laz57
Thanks guys.
I bought a few Ameri-town and MTH multi-story buildings, including the MTH 6-story which I really cherish. But I needed a station, a real union station, so I’m building my hometown Union Station right now. It is intended to look like Union Station but it can’t be an accurate representation because of size. So I have adjusted elements of the design to work. It features the essential architectural elements and is scaled to Lionel track spacing of 5 1/4? I think. There are 6 tracks that emerge from under the North waiting room section which is nearing completion, at least the lower level.
To address your question about mutliple stories, it will eventually have about four levels. There is compression of architectural elements and it is essentially store-front (or station back in this case). I am making it chiefly out of basswood. There was a little very thin plywood necessary for a veneer section, and I have braced and stiffened the structure with 1x2’s. Architectural elements emerge off of a flat facade with layers and levels of basswood strips. The curve elements of windows have been progressively etched out with an exacto blade, as have the basswood strips. I began work on Union Station in early August. It is coming right along. I shared it with the owners of my railroad hobby shop and they recognized it immediately.
It is being built without plans (don’t know where to get them and wouldn’t do any good anyway because I have to depart strategically from the original design when necessary). Basically I started with a single photo of the North waiting room that was in a book. I took it to Kinko’s where I enlarged it to where that section approximated the Lionel scale of distance between tracks. That also established the vertical height reference and calculation. From there I have worked progressively along and from an initial reference point, which indicates subsequent dimensions and elements of the structure. I visit the Station and
Sounds great! Please share pictures when your done. Thanks for your reply.