I recently purchased at a garage sale two Atlas structure kits unassembled in their original boxes.
#1 - Atlas N Gauge “Machine Shop” - part # 2828-150.
#2 - Atlas N Gauge “L Shaped Engine House” - part # 2881-300.
The assembly instruction sheets were both copyrighted in 1967 by the Atlas Tool Company. Neither building is actually N gauge - they seem to be Z gauge. All of my rolling stock is much too large for the doors. Was N gauge a different scale in 1967?
No, N gauge has always been n gauge.
IIRC, those kits from Atlas needed to be on a foundation to raise the building to clear the tracks. Most people just used pieces of cork roadbed. That raised the building high enough for clearance above the track/roadbed.
Darrell, quiet…for now
N-Scale has always been 1:160 and N-Gauge has always been 9mm – after all, that’s where the “N” in N-Scale came from!
Actually that machine shop works better for a non rail served industry or served by a siding along side the building since its a small industry.
As a side note that building is a fine representative of industrial structures of that era in N or HO…You see back then the majority of the industrial building kits was really to small for rail service…I am satisfied that a 40’ boxcar load would swap their receiving area…It would take several days production runs to fill that 40’ boxcar…
I’m wondering - is this building a small rectangular 2 story building, bottom is ‘brick’, top is large windows, on a molded base w/ ‘rails’ running through the building length-wise, entering and exiting via smallish doors on the short sides, and there’s a small gantry crane in front of the building straddling the rails? (and in addition to the ‘big’ sliding doors, at least 1 regular door and a few small windows, I think on the side)
‘Cause if it is, I had the same building in HO scale many years ago, couldn’t quite make out what to do with it as the doors were just as short in proportion to HO scale as to your N scale building to N scale (I could run flat cars into the building, but I think a 50’ flat car would stick out - the building was quite small). If this is the building, I think it was just poorly designed - not everything to come out of the 1960s was finely crafted [:P]
Stuff like that makes good kitbash fodder for combining into a larger structure, or as a separate outbuilding in a larger industrial complex.
I used a gang of those old Heljan printing company kits, and a couple of Model Power “brewery” kits to build this large mill…
Lee