Since I started setting up my first Christmas layout of the season this week, I thought I’d start sharing some photos! There will be 3 layouts all together this year. The last one to be set up will be the Disneyland Project. In between the Disneyland layout and the Postwar-n-Plasticville bedroom layout I started this week, will come the Standard Gauge set up in the room next door to mine. But for now, we’ll focus on the one I’ll see most often! [swg]
This layout is 4 foot by 6 foot and has 2 loops of track. The outer oval is American Flyer S gauge and the inner is O31 MTH RealTrax. It has a 145 Gateman, a 125 Whistle Shack, a 3472 Milk Car with 3462P platform, an MTH 394 rotating aircraft beacon and an MPC era Banjo Signal. That’s it for fancy operating accessories! Otherwise it’s all Plasticville and postwar trains! All structures are lighted, but there are no operating streetlights. Just the traditional green Plasticville poles with the glow in the dark globes. For citizens I use 54mm figures and the vehicles I’ll use this year will be from my small collection of 1:43 ERTL, Corgi, Road Champs and other die cast cars and trucks.
To start it all off, here’s one of my favorite structures, the Howard Johnson’s:
This is in fact a modified Plasticville Schoolhouse. To make one, first you need to make sure everything is dissassembled. Clean and fix what you can if you’re using an old junker as I did. (See the chip above the sign and the crack on the right end?) Paint the 4 walls white and the roof orange. For the windows, I cut the muntins out of the standard kit windows and painted them in a blue-green to match the signage I made on my PC. I backed the windows with clear plastic from packaging I’d saved and lined t
Becky, neat stuff, keep us posted on the progress of your Christmas layouts. With the Disneyland project and now these other layouts about how much time per day are you putting in on the trains.
Installed and lighted. Behind the pick-up truck in which HoJo employees have returned with this year’s tree, is the current grey bodied tan roofed Plasticville Motel which completes HoJo’s corner of the layout. I’ll get pics of that “Motorlodge” tomorrow when I get that section of the layout wired.
But here’s what I’ve done so far:
The tree went up today. Due to furniture issues, the right end is completely inaccessable once the layout is finished. So naturally those structures had to be done before the tree could go up. Then I could decorate the tree in the middle of the room (which is still cramped) and lift it into place when finished.
The front right corner, mostly obscured by my bed, is the airport.
The runway signs and the tall white on-operating lamps are modern airport toys. The working runway lights are HO scale Model Power globe streetlamps with brass poles. It’s very easy to pull the bases off of them and then shorten the pole to whatever length you desire. I also bend the poles 90 degrees to make working wall sconces on O or larger structures. (See the Main Street Station in my Disneyland thread.)
In the hanger is the airplane from the Lionel operating pylon. I use the pylon on my Standard Gauge la
I call this one the “postwar layout” but in reality all eras are welcome! [:D] It’s just that with all the Plasticville I tend to run more equipment from the 50’s and 60’s than anything else. Besides, the Christmas tree with it’s wonderful asbestos flocking [:S] is a postwar piece in and of itself! [:D]
Over on the left front corner I’ve placed the modern issue Turnpike Tollbooth and some of my favorite diecast vehicles. Accross the tracks are a Hershey’s delivery truck and a B and O bus.
The color on this one is a bit hinky but it still looks cool in it’s way.
THE COLA WARS!
An entire batallion of fire fighters and police has shown up to prevent a battle between the drivers of the yellow and red Coca Cola truck and the blue Pepsi truck!
Meanwhile the Boy Scouts are far too involved with their campfire ghost stories to worry about soda pop! [(-D]
I couldn’t agree more with that.^ I wish I had half the energy and determination that Becky has with these projects. I check the threads every chance I get eager to see what she accomplished.
Becky,
Keep up the great work. Seriously, have you considered talking to the folks of CTT? With what you’ve done, there seems to be a lot of potential for great articles.
Before I put it away from Halloween, I thought I’d play around a bit and take some funky photos with the blacklight. [:D] No, that towtruck driver isn’t secretly transporting Plutonium, that’s the reflection of the supercharged streetlamp above under UV light! [(-D]
Woohoo! Look at that billboard glow! [(-D]
Seriously though, who builds a hospital next door to a coal fired power plant??? [(-D]
One of my modified Lionel 4-4-2’s in NKP garb doesn’t even phase the boys playing in the schoolyard.
The real fun came when I turned everything but the blacklight off. [:D] Check that crossbuck on the 154!
I must admit that I thought the leading edge of classic layout design was reached long ago until you began posting your work. A one woman revolution. You have a creative mind that has really expanded what can be done with less. I hope you take Rodger’s offer.
Wonderful work. Your pictures are inspiring. I’d love to see an entire article on your work. What I like best is the work is all yours and on a modest budget.
Thanks guys! I’m working on it! I’m going to need a lot of help getting better photos! And I can’t think of anyplace better than this forum to find it! [:D][Y]
ONCE UPON A TIME…
I had the ability to work outside at Christmas time as well. I called the display “34th Street” after the movie. In it’s final incarnation for Christmas 2002, before I developed health issues had to go on hiatus, there were 40,000 lights and about a metric ton of plywood decorations.
Top to bottom, left to right: 1: Overview of the whole operation which surrounded the house on 3 sides. 2: The back yard featuring an electric garden with a swan swimming on a pond of electric water. 3: Tigger, Pooh and Christopher Robin. 4: Mr. Jingeling, local Christmas legend. 5: My rendition of the Sundblom Coca Cola Santa unpacking a Lionel set for a lucky child. The set included a 392E w/tender, 514R, red 517, green 516 and a yellow 515 plus 2 tunnels. 6: Ready Killowatt. 7: My life-sized Nativity, out front and most prominent of all the displays.
8: The big train with 4-2-0 locomotive, tender with elf and Christmas tree, yellow 512 gondola with Rudolph, Herbie and the Misfit Toys, “Holly Berry Dairy Farms” tanker in chocolate brown and caboose with penguin. There was also a small depot and a crossbuck in this display. 9: Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang celebrate close to the “north pole”. 10: The front half of our side lot was dominated by the Sesame Street characters. Big Bird is 7 feet tall and 6 feet long where the majority of my characters were 4 feet tall. 11: Mickey, Minney, Donald< Goofy and Pluto sing carols on the p
How many sabre saw blades did you wear out on those plywood cutouts? I made a nativity scene once with some pre-printed pictures pasted on plywood and it took me several days and a pack on blades. Did you paint them all yourself?
Believe it or not, an aunt and uncle bought me a jigsaw, a pile of paint and plywood and the plans for the stable as a Christmas gift in 1988! [(-D] By that time I had already been setting up lots of lights and decorations every year. But it wasn’t till that year that I discovered the magic of the jigsaw. [swg] The original stable got replaced twice before I came up with this “Roman Ruins” motif. (One memorable year I built the stable out of limbs from a crabapple tree I’d cut down and thatched the roof with pine boughs.) I also added several figures (2 shepherds, drummer boy, camel, big angel) to the creche beyond what the original kit plans made.
After that, it just grew bit by bit every year. While the train started out as just the locomotive (copied from a Carlton Cards ornament if I remember), other sections like the Peanuts, Sesame Street and Mickey and friends were added in their entirety each year. For most of the characters, I sought out comic books, Little Golden Books or coloring books which often give you nice line drawings to work from. Then I’d lay the wood out on the floor and draw each one freehand with a pencil until it looked “enough” like the original art. When I was satisfied, I would go over my pencil drawing with a black marker and prime the piece. The heavy ink lines would show through the primer but erratic pencil marks would not. Then I’d paint them with latex and seal them with spray polyeurethane. Most were on 1/2" unsanded BCX which was cheap and in my budgetary range! [(-D]
I made Christmas trees out of cereal bowls, a Tori (Japanese garden arch) out of shelving brackets and a snowman out of the heavy ends of a cable reel. If I could, I would! [(-D] I was even running a “home for wayward Christmas trees” by 2002! [(-D] Anyone who knew me would rather give me their old natty artificial tree rather
You say this layout is basicly 50-60 well then you ask kiddingly "
Seriously though, who builds a hospital next door to a coal fired power plant??? " well back then it would not of been thought twice about the effects and would of gone ahead and done it.
Believe it or not, hospitals used to burn coal for heat. There ia an old hospital building in the town where I work that has been turned into an apartment building. It has a tall stack by it to this day.
" well back then it would not of been thought twice about the effects and would of gone ahead and done it.