scratch building

I want to try to make my own tall buildings for my downtown scene on my layout. Does anyone know of a good supplier to build skyscrapers for this?

How tall is “tall?”

For structures in the 2-6 story range, look at Walthers Cornerstone modulars, or you might just want to get sheets of brick-textured styrene from companies like Evergreen or Plastruct.

If you’re looking for very big buildings, then you might want to just order big sheets of styrene from www.usplastic.com or a local plastic distributer, if you’ve got one in your neighborhood. You won’t get the brickface texture, but you probably don’t want that anyway.

Remember, though, that railroads and skyscrapers seldom appear together in the real world.

Someone a while back wanted to model some Dallas skyscrapers. There are architectural modeler supply sites out there for scale city planning. I found quite a few links to these but I don’t have them anymore. I think I Googled “architectural models” or something like that. Some of the stuff like trees and details where a lot cheaper then our train stuff. I was surprised how much stuff I found.

Look for some of Bachmann’s now discontinued “Cityscenes” kits at train shows or on eBay. There were a couple nice tall “skyscraper” type buildings in the series.

For scratchbuilding ideas, here’s a couple suggestions:

  • Get a copy of John Pryke’s ‘Building City Scenery For Your Model Railroad’. There’s a neat article on page 11 showing a skyscraper built from a tall plexiglass box with vinyl tape applied to the sides to form architectural trim and windows.

  • Search the MR index for “Jonathan Jones”. He wrote an article on an urban layout. He wrote about using foam board, posterboard, and wood trim to build background building flats. You might use a similar technique for your “skyscrapers”. Here’s a link to the on-line version of the article:

http://www.trains.com/mrr/default.aspx?c=a&id=171

This article was printed in the May 2001 issue of MR.

Hope this info is useful.

Bruce J.

ooooops…

The article detailing the building flats is titled “Building Sweeney Manufacturing”, published in the May 2002 issue.

Bruce J.

http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/189-1006

Found this kit. Thought it might interest you. They also sell additional floors to make it taller.