The rising cost of gasoline has spilled over to the local residents of my HO village. Gas prices have shot up from 22 cents a gallon to a record high of 43 cents in just the past two months. “This is Criminal” said customers of this 1937 service station. Next, oil company exec’s will be telling us that in the future, say 2006, people will be paying 3.00 dollars a gallon for reqular!
Very nice work, Bob. What scale is it?
Tom
Beat me to the idea. Nice looking station. Love the cars. If gas gets any higher here I will have to start walking to the hobby shop.
Not for me. I’m modelling the gas-guzzling 1960’s, complete with tail fins and gas prices around a quarter a gallon. Why, back then I could fill 'er up for less than what you pay now for a gallon. And somebody from the gas station would do the pumping, wash your windshield, check your oil and then give you a complementary drinking glass or steak knife just for filling up. He had to do it, because the guy across the street had bikini-clad “pump bunnies” manning his hoses. And when you got a few books of those S&H Green Stamps, you could turn them in for a croquet set.
The sad part, for those of you born too late, or those who took the Jefferson Airplane too seriously and don’t remember the sixties, is that this was really all true. I’ve still got one of those steak knives and the croquet set to prove it. Didn’t have to pay a buck and a half for a pint of drinking water, though…
Fiatfan:
The model is HO scale. It was scratch-built from one I saw on the Franklin and South Manchester (FSM) website. I had to quess what the righthand and rear sides of the building looked like since the original model is photographed from the front side only. I downloaded the Coke signs from Trevinocircle.com. The rest of the signs were made using Paint on my PC. You may want to play around with the font sizes until you find one that works for your scale.
Have fun.
Bob…
Thats an awesome Idea to change the gas prices on the layout!! Smart thinking!
Sperry & Hutchinson green stamps… (as I wipe away a tear from remembering a much simpler time)… aside from race riots and Vietnam, the 60s were fun!!
Yea too bad President Bush is a idiot and won’t control gas companies price inflation. I think there might be a law or ADMENDMENT that says monopolys are not legal!! Too bad, now is no time to talk poltics
But nobody remembers what a pain it was to lick the stamps (everyone remembers we used to lick stamps, right?). I think my mother still has the table lamp we got for ours.
When I bought my first new car a gallon of full-service Esso gas and a loaf of A&P bread were roughly the same price, about 29 cents. Maps were free, too.
Very nice work on the scene, Bob. But to make it more like today, you need to have a guy with a bucket of paint heading up a ladder to paint “44”!
This site sells signs, but you can just right-click and then do a Save As to get a small copy of the thumbnail, suitable for your gas station:
http://www.nascaracestore.com/60oil/60oil1.html
Gas stations have their fallen flags, too. Remember the Sinclair dinosaur?
u thik the price of gas is hight here in canada it 's 1.20 litter that would be 4.24 a gallon in the states and then if you conver it to us prices it would be 4.96 gallon.
I would love to pay 3 .00 dollars a gallon for gas.
Beautiful shot of some very nice modeling. I think, though, that in 1937 there was nothing but regular–with lead. [:)] Thanks for sharing the “timely” pic.
Ron
Actually, the monopoly is not the US oil companies (there are quite a few) but OPEC. The production cost of a barrel of oil in Saudi Arabia is ~$3. It’s the Arabs that are making most of the profits out of higher gas prices.
In reality, the higher prices today are not really a function of monopolies. Monopolies increase prices by reducing supply. If you actually look at the numbers, it’s demand that has exploded in recent years due to the industrialization of China and India rather than some secret deal to cut supply. This is the main culprit behind rising prices. The answer isn’t whining but doing things like building nuclear power plants.
Hey Bruce,
I remember those days, but I was only 5 or 6 years old then, my dad would pull up to the station and get the full service fill up just like that, and we would get the steak knives or a drinking glasses. I am trying to remember if was a Sinclair station, is that the one with the dinosaur logo? Maybe it was Shell station! We collected those S&H stamps too, but I remember getting those from the A&P grocery, that was when you could get a full two baskets of groceries for under $100.00.
43 cents a gallon? Its those dam oil companies in Pennsylvania fault!
Yes, Sinclair had the Dinosaur logo at one time.