New buildings on the J&B

Jean’s been after me to build up my town a bit, so I decided I needed a hardware store and a cafe. These are rather small buildings but are made to 1:20 and made to complement my bank.

The front is a single piece of corrugated plastic (about 3/8" thick). The ends and back are made of the same material and covered with Precision Products brick sheet.

Openings were cut for the windows. All windows were custom made as I wanted different sizes. They are glazed with 1/16 or 1/8" acrylic, depending on what I had on hand. The hardware windows are built up with styrene and glazed with acrylic as well. I found some old junk and stuff and placed them in the windows.

Since I was sort of detailing the hardware store, I thought I’d go ahead and “populate” the windows with people that I’ve operated with over the years. I scaled pictures to 1:20 then printed them on vinyl, mounted them on plastic and glued them behind the windows. The hard part was finding pictures that would work. Most of my photos have been taken outside, or could not scale correctly.

Building

I started off by modifying a “Fine Folk” figure. The hat was replaced with a cap; beard and glasses added. Plus an early RCS controller in his right hand. ;)The cigar is just a piece of brass rod.

Hi Great pics looks just great, if it was mine I would remove 2-3 figures from the winows, reason it looks over crowded leave a couple of windows empty. Thats just my comment but as we all say 12ft rule if it looks ok at that distanance go with it.[8D]

Bruce:

Looks good. I really like the idea of “thought I’d go ahead and ‘populate’ the windows with people that I’ve operated with”. Very interesting concept! Thanks for sharing the idea. Hope you don’t mind if I do the same with buildings I have “in storage” (read - still in the box).

Nice photos, great ideas, thanks for sharing.

Fun stuff, Rob

I think I’ll have to work my grand daughter’s picture into one of the buildings she has played with for the last 6 years. She’s now 10 and getting out of playing on the layout with my people and buildings.