Source for low relief buildings, background photos? 1/23/08

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

I added the date to let people know they are responding to a CURRENT thread.

I was wondering if you folks have a source for low relief store fronts and buildings other than Walthers’. The only thing I can come up with is DPM kits. I would use the front of the kit and maybe a little of the side pieces.

I would also like to add a backdrop with a smaller city scene and bluffs to add to the depth. What would you guys recommend to accomplish this illusion?

I’m trying to avoid paying for an expensive kit to only use part of it. Any and all ideas are welcome.

2

I’ve scratch most of my low relief structures following prototype industries, and best of all it was cheep to do. Evergreen Styrene is a great building material for this. Here’s a easy low relief structure to make as an example.
http://www.geocities.com/oldlahistory/miller.html

3

Why not photograph a building, size it appropriately, print and adhere to foamboard, matboard, etc. for low relief? This is what I plan to do on layout expansion. They’ll be in the background, so any lack of relief will be less noticeable anyway (I model n-scale). And–they’ll be showing actual structures that have meaning to the layout. Just a thought.

4

You can use any building kit or combine kits to use as low relief buildings. I like to go to RR swap meets looking for cheap building kits. I paid .25 each fo these two!

I paid $1.00 ea for these two…they were in gray primer so all I had to do was paint them…they are made of some kind of hard foam. They have no backs so they can only be used as background buildings.

GO ON LINE!..just do a search for what type of buildings your looking for!

I like to go to ebay under collectable-paper-postcards and copy-n-paste insides of buldings. Paste image to a desktop that you can resize to your scale. Then you can print your image. I also do this with signs, background buildings, machinery, people ect!

You can cut out these buildings, put them on artist foam-board to give some depth off your backdrop or make the part of the scene.

[IMG]http://i86.photobucket.com/albums/k103/usnvet76/cok