Hi - I’ve been busy scratchbuilding or kit-bashing structures for my freelance railroad (set in 1930’s-ish Maine) for a few years now, and try to make them believable (even to the point of designing the whole interior for a hotel in Sketchup just to ensure that windows would be in sensible positions for the room layout! - well, that’s just me!).
But my buildings do tend to end up looking like they have just been built, in contrast to the rather tatty, run-down and, dare I say it, rather caricatured look structures and “craftsman kits” that appear on many layouts.
I’m not saying I don’t like those - they are clearly visually interesting and have a lot of photographic appeal, but I wonder how representative they really are of real-world structures.
I am UK based, so have no first-hand experience to guide me. I would welcome comments on this - any of you building similar era stuff, what approach do you take to authenticity?
Real world structures are all of differing ages and states of upkeep. For the utmost realism, your layout should reflect that. For your personal enjoyment, do what you like and/or have time for.
Gidday Bob, like you I have no first-hand experience, but this is where Google Images can be your friend. OK, so being the 1930s, colour or lack of it can be an issue, but you can at least you can see the general condition of buildings.
And on a similar sentiment as Mike, are you happy with your results?
That “everything is run down and falling apart” look, made famous by George Sellios on His Franklin and South Manchester layout, and with his line of Fine Scale Minature craftsman kits is a “caricature” style that does not reflect real life, during the Great Depression , or at any other time in U.S. history.
There were brand new or well maintained buildings the day the market crashed, they did not become neglected or run down over night, or neceesarily ever, during that time period.
As suggested by Mike, realistic scenes are created by a balanced mix of apparent ages and conditions.
In Fact, WWII produced more “deferred maintenance” then the depression, and the 50’s was a period of rapid repair, replacement, expansion and upgrading in the U.S.
Since the 20’s had been a period of great prosperity and growth, lots of stuff was still realitively “brand new” in the 30’s.
FSM, South River, and FOScale (at least) are/were all New England based, and tend to reflect the architecture of the area - I’ve lived here for the last 30 years and can attest that there are a lot of quirky/cutsie and visually interesting structures (old mills, etc.) in these parts. Since many structures have been around a long time, they have been added onto and modified over the years.
I have built a number of FSM kits, and there is no reason one has to weather these to the extent that they look completely dilapidated. There is a range here - the South River structures I believe are all modeled on prototypical structures, while FOScale says explicitely that the models come from their imagination, and FSM maybe somewhere in the middle …
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so you have to decide what looks right to you.
Depends on where you live. In the 1930’s along the rail tracks the houses were grimy in areas, burning coal is dirty. Coal dust is dirty, pulled down enough ceilings back east to attest to that and burning oil is no better people tend to forget that as few now have lived though it. I used to walk the rails a lot and even in the diesel era things close to the tracks are really grimy.
Something to keep in mind is that, even in the worst point in the Great Depression, 75% of people were still working. In some cases, one spouse lost their job but the other kept theirs, so the family did still have some income.
Plus, it was a depression (i.e., not a recession) because it had double-digit unemployment and deflation - prices dropping.Not sure of the exact prices, but I suspect the average homeowner could buy enough paint to paint their entire house for a couple of dollars. People had pride in their homes, they wanted the lawn mowed and the fence painted etc.
For railroads, you’d put the old equipment on a sidetrack and use your newest engines and cars because they were still being paid for - the equipment had to earn revenue to pay off the trust / mortgage arrangement they were purchased with. Plus newer engines and newer, larger freight cars were more economical - ran better, larger capacity. Passengers preferred to ride in the newer passenger cars, not old falling-apart ones.
Making structures look realistic is a challenge. What I found is looking at pictures of real ones helps or models of built areas online. You can try to connect with the builder(s) should you find anything to replicate.
I have found that most simple kits are just four walls and a roof. They can be assembled per the instructions, but I prefer to think of kits as only a starting point. That’s why one of those simple kits takes me a month. I want interior detailing, including walls and floors, plus lighting. The exterior will likely be painted to fit in with its surroundings. I print my own decals, which makes it easy to customize the names of businesses and add period appropriate advertising.
It’s this customization that brings a structure to life and draws the viewer into the scene. I look for kits with loading dock doors I can cut open and build a small scene inside, perhaps just with boxes or perhaps with figures and a hand cart.
My suggestion is to ignore kits and other modelers work and focus on real buildings shown in photos and drawings (as in the online Historical American Building Survey).
There has been a strong trend in North American modeling to model decrepitude because it is deemed to have “character.” It dates back to the generations of modelers influenced by John Allen and Malcom Furlow. But that fashion has mushroomed beyond even their approach. It now says more about the present era of rust belt blight than a true reflection of earlier times. True, the 1930s brought constrained maintenance, but buildings that had been maintained in the Edwardian Age through the '20s, didn’t fall into disrepair over night.
Moreover, many if not most “craftsmen” kits are not accurate reproductions of real structures anyway–and they usually do not reflect real architectural styles. Rather they tend to copy each others’ designs and add all sorts of extensions, dormers, and eye-catching but extraneous details.
Given your interest in Maine, I would especially caution you to ignore most of the commercial “dock” scenes, as they are based on made-up ideas of “quaint” water front buildings, not what you would have found in historic New England seaports. If you look at pictures of places like the fishing port of Gloucester (where I live) in earlier eras you will see rather plain but elegant, barn-like structures, quite unlike the “caricatures” you note. Also, few were in sad shape until the end of the 20th century when the fishing industry here collapsed.
Will never forget my father’s stories about growing up in West Berkeley, Ca. during the 30s & 40s. He, his brother, cousins and Billy Martin grew up in that tough, ‘gritty, down by the tracks’ industrial-residential neighborhood.
Pops never forgot his roots, and as a kid in the 50s I was fortunate that he sometimes took me along when visiting his old neighborhood. The houses were in various states of repair, some rundown and many built at the turn of the 20th century.
Though not modeling the 30s era nor residential I tried to incorporate some of the flavor upon my layout, and successful or not brings back some fond memories.
I like the look of the old dilapidated structures except for one thing that I think is way overdone, and that is the steel roofs.
Aging steel (galvanized) roofs do not have numerous panels partially lifting from the roof, and there aren’t numerous creases and bends. If all the panels were that loose they would have blown off long ago. There may be a section where the roof has been partially torn away but the rest of the roof will be smooth. The torn/missing panels will almost always be on an edge where the prevailing wind hits the structure.
One of the best ways to suggest an aging roof is to use rust. A really ancient roof may be fully rusted, but ‘middle aged’ roofs will often only be partially rusted. The partial rust can occur anywhere on the panels, but sometimes it only happens on one side of the panel and the opposite side will have relatively little rust. This is a relatively easy pattern to create, and it can add visual interest and depth to the structure.
This pattern is often repeated on multiple panels that were made at the same time. The rust occurs when the galvanizing wears off over time, and if the layer of zinc was not distributed evenly across the panel(s), the thinner zinc coating will wear off first leaving one side rusty but not the other (at least not to the same degree).
If you have an air brush, I think that the partially rusted effect could be done quite easily by using a recipe card or similar to mask off one panel vertically while you spray the rust stripe on the half of the adjacent panel, partially overlaping the card. When the first stripe is done, move the card to the next vertical seam and use a narrow spray pattern to spray both the card and some of the exposed panel.
Don’t forget that not all rust is the same colour. New rust tends to be bright orange whereas really old rust can be a very dark brown. Don’t be afraid to use a dry brush technique or weathering powders to vary the colour.
A big thank you to everyone who has responded - it was a pleasure to read all your comments and advice this morning (it is 7.30am here in UK as I write this).
I think I have taken the right approach, and I am mostly happy with my results. A bit more weathering needed on many but I have got the “look” I want.
My main difficulty is in buying appropriate detail parts here in UK. I have been able to find some Tichy parts - doors, windows etc. are relatively easy to source - but things like NBW castings/moldings are never available. And so much here is, for good reason, OO scale rather than HO (though they are often advertised as both) and it just doesn’t work. Brick sheet is an example - put OO bricks alongside the Walthers kits and the scale difference is very obvious.
So, compromises have to be made, and have been made in many places. I shall try to post some pics of my work but I’ll need to sort out that another time. I changed my broadband a while ago and had to lose the multiple fixed IP addresses I used to have; in the process my image server now doesn’t work. I’ll get there eventually…!
Beautiful work there! Maybe just a touch of weathering on a couple of the roofs, but in my opinion at least (and it’s not worth much!) you are hitting the sweet spot between brand new and decrepit! Also, adding a little vegitation (as in the last shot of the hotel) goes a long way toward making the scene “look right”.
Bob, So much to like about your fine modeling, nice dock scenes, sea walls, river boat, plank fence and handsome structures among others. Hoping to see your work in future WPF threads.
Excellent models! A little weathering would probably enhance them, especially buildings along the tracks which would get dirty pretty quickly during the steam era.
It’s important to keep in mind that dirty or fading and flaking paint does not mean decrepit or unmaintained.
Coal smoke, soot, cinders, and ballast dust kicked up by a passing train will affect nearby buildings. It’s neither good or bad, just a fact. Rain will wash much off but also cause streaking and buildup in cracks and crevices, just like a weathering wash.
The same is true for buildings near industrial sites, especially mining, or coal/ore handling, and heavy industries like steel mills, foundries, gas plants, chemical plants. Anywhere that in the 1930’s would have significant emissions with little or no controls.
But, moving away from the railroads and industry, buildings will usually only be subjected to blowing dirt, so overall much less dirty. Fading or peeling paint is normal as the building nears it’s normal repainting schedule. Again, this does not mean the building is decrepit or unmaintained; it’s just normal wear.
Decrepit buildings is a more reason occurrence in the US, mostly due to the closures of small businesses and the abandonment of their buildings that nobody else wanted.
Thanks! I had a lot of fun with the hotel, including the architectural design work I mentioned earlier. There are interior rooms - a dining room on the left of the ground floor and a lounge on the right, with furniture. All rooms have lighting, and there is an Arduino controller for that which, when it detects darkness, turns on the downstairs lights, and randomly decides which bedrooms are occupied that night and lights them up over some time to simulate people going to bed. In one room, there is a couple who can be seen to be, er, enjoying themselves if you peep through the window at the right time!
In fact, most of my structures have lighting of some sort, similarly controlled by Arduino with varying effects.
I should add, in case the general style of the hotel building may seem familiar to some of you, that I took a great deal of inspiration from Troels Kirk’s Coast Line railroad, which started me down the coastal Maine route. His Seaview Hotel is quite similar, and acknowledgements are thus due.
I don’t know were all this pride was. I got my stories from my parents who lived it, my mom lived on a farm so they had plenty of food but no money at all, my dad was a city boy and was driving a delivery truck at a very young age just to survive. I grew up not far from the tracks and in the 50’s it was not clean there.
