Greetings all railroaders. One of my absolute favorite parts of model railroading is scratchbuilding structures. If I have a few plans and some pictures I can scratchbuild most anything. Driving around my city (Jacksonville, FL) I get loads of ideas on buildings to build. I just completed one of an old 1940’s style gas station complete with arched doorways and stucco walls. Problem is I find very few scratchbuilding projects in the pages of MR. Is there another source out there that anyone knows of that features loads of scratchbuilding ideas?
Railroad Line Forums has several threads of nothing but pictures of buildings that cry out to be modeled. If you are looking for plans, good luck, the magzines do maybe one or two building plans a year. Best bet is to go to the magazine index on the Trains.com site and search for building plans.
Hello a good place for photo and plans is the library of congress. www.loc.gov I have found some plans and photos for a old barn/garage for my junk yard. Hope this helps Frank
Rail Model Craftsman has more “how-to-build-it” articles than MR does. Old MR’s from the 1980’s and back have more plans and construction stuff and are often available at train shows for $1 an issue.
In addition to RMC and older issues of MR, check out the Narrow Gauge and Shortline Gazette. They have plans for structures and other railroad related projects that are usable in any gauge or scale.
You might check Lance Mindheim’s “Voodoo & Palmettos” Miami based layout. Lance has two Florida layouts; East Rail and the Downtown Spur. Both are prototypical warehouse district switching layouts and he is scratchbuilding all the structures from photographs that were taken by him and associates.
http://maps.live.com - Only seems to work well with Internet Explorer, but has something called “Bird’s Eye View” that allow you to see building from above at an angle, and rotate to see things from the north, east, south and west.
Couple of reasonably modelgenic places I have stumbled upon before:
http://maps.google.com has a nice function called “street view” (I think), which allows you to walk down some streets and look in various directions.
Here is e.g. a side view of the University of Wisconsin’s coal heating plant, viewed from Dayton Street http://tinyurl.com/c7wfqm
The Library of Congress HABS/HAER (Historical American Building Survey/Historical American Engineering Records) at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/collections/habs_haer/ has a nice collection of photos and drawings of various buildings that can be used as a source for model railroading scratchbuildi
Check the Kalmbach publication list they have a book called" Lineside industries" I think and a couple others too. that are pretty good. The plans are in different scales but a little playin around with a copier should have you cuttin parts out fairly quickly. Don’t pass up cardstock as a building material either. BILL
My apologies for not getting back to everyone sooner. I was out of pocket all weekend. Thanks to everyone who submitted suggestions and ideas about scratchbuilding projects. They are all appreciated…and I have lots of look through.
Just a quick added note. I just remembered that I had the book below and checked amazon.com - you can still buy this Model Railroader Handbook (both new and used):
It has quite a few plans for various buildings, and also discusses quite a bit about scratchbuilding techniques. The buildings may or may not work for you, but the techniques look good.
Another scratchbuild was a Miami inspired warehouse German modeler Kurt (cnw1961) showed over at “the gauge”: http://www.the-gauge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=169 - look through the first 4-5 pages to see the process from photo to scratchbuilt building - very impressive!
