Been browsing the forums a bit, and decided I like the community enough to introduce myself [8)]
Im 31, just moved to Corvallis Oregon, from Eugene. Ive decided to start construction on a large HO layout. I am fairly ignorant to many aspects of the Model Railroad industry, and railroad lingo at that… so bear with me in the upcoming posts.
If any of you railroad enthusiasts might be familiar with an author Tom Dill, who has written many books on railroads, and different train runs around the west coast, that is a very good, and old time friends father. He is a great man.
At any rate, I hope to become a part of both help and helped here, with my working into a long term project
First question though, I have been trying to find anywhere online that has blueprint like drawings of buildings, one could download or save image, to use as templates for scratch building… any references to this would be great, since I plan to scratch build as much as possible, if not nearly all.
Glad to meet you all. Thers an image of me in the thread of killing cats… [B)]
I think lots of people scratch built from photos. You can use doors, people, or other known objects to scale things. Or, if you take the photo, put something of known size in the picture to scale from. For a particular building, you might get drawings, but in many cases they are not going to exist, or be easy to find.
No erra yet specified, still working on that bit, but probly around 80’s. So modern stuff. Although the wife is trying hard to get the erra way, way back… like early 1900’s
Thanks, I guess in the mean time I will continue to search sites online, but I figured as much to draw out my own templates and prints of buildings.
hello and welcome to the forum…first off, you need to read a lot of books before you start so that you can learn a lot of the tricks of the trade. www.kalmbach.com has a lot of books to choose from and they aren’t too terribly expensive… for the beginner you need to order and read books with the following subjects: 1. track planning 2. benchwork 3. wiring your layout 4. trackwork 5. scenery…there are a lot of mistakes that can be made on the first layout that, through ignorance , usually drive a lot of people away from the hobby , so having a good idea of what to do before you begin will save you a lot of frustration later…now on your scratchbuilding question…there isn’t a lot out there on specific “scratchbuilding” but a lot on what is called “kit bashing” (the art of taking different kit buildings and turning them into an entirely different building altogether) what i do, is take pictures of all four sides of a building i want on my layout and by using sheets of styrene plastic and kit doors and windows, i’ll build it…also, i’ve found that the railroad will go up a lot faster if you keep the scratch building to a bare minimum and assemble kits or kitbash instead…scratch building is very time consuming which can really slow down the railroad empire’s progress…chuck
If you want to visit a furum with a lot of scratchbuilding going on see http://www.the-gauge.com Just make sure you come back. Especially check out the academy. the Chevron and the Wendy’s are really cool, as is most of the stuff. It’s a bit somber over there right now, one of the big contributors died yesterday. There is a section of his work, also in the Academy.
Thanks Chuck,
I guess I was briefe with my ignorance, I have been around the model railroad scene most my life. My father has had a railroad in just about every house we have lived in, and takes it quite serious.
I am a crafter at heart, I have a full woodworking shop, have built and flew model Airplanes most my life in competitions, and had a few railroad layouts myself in the past.
I was just hoping there were sites that had pre-drawn blueprint type diagrams for buildings to help minimise the time of drawing up my own
[#welcome][#welcome][#welcome][#welcome][#welcome] to the forum. hope you like it here and stay a member. we are just a bunch of Model Railroaders, talking trains. people here will always be willing to help you out. My advice ask ask ask (we wont bite) [8D] Tim
