The tinplate metal buildings have been discontinued because the material is no longer available. The courrugated buildings are now mat board. And the kits are laser cut instead of die cut.
I built several Suydam kits back in their day as well as the Southern Pacific Passenger Station kit currently the center piece on my layout. It was originally a Suydam/California Models kit, it was an Alpine Division kit when I bought it back in the 90s.
The 84 passengers and SP employees didn’t come with the kit, the covered passenger area is a Walthers kit add on, the fence is Atlas. The entire structure is covered with Campbell 800 shingles. The Campbell shingles and Northeast Scale Lumber structure corner posts came in the Alpine kit.
Didn’t almost every layout have their Swift Packing Plant on it? It actually looked pretty decent considering there weren’t many large American style buildings available back then.
I just built an old Suydam kit last year. It is a metal office building kit which I included in a rural scene with several other buildings. The good news is you need not solder, but instead you may now use modern adhesives to glue it together.
It is the building behind the orange tractor trailer in this photo.
I built this Suydam metal kit some time ago, and had it on a part of my layout that has been rebuilt. It is now in storage awaiting a new site on my present layout
I got this in a yard sale box of trains back in the 1960s. I’ve had it since then. This is its second layout. I appended it to a Walthers stockyard. I love this old structure and hopefully I’ll have another layout to put it on in the future.
Thanks for the link, G Paine. I clicked on it and had a pleasant trip down Memory Lane. I had several Suydam (BTW, if you new guys didn’t know, it’s pronounced SIGH-dum) structures on my HO railroads, back in the Good Ol’ Days. Boy, I sure miss my folks’ basement, with my Cozy Nook–er, workshop, in a corner next to the railroad yard.
I absolutely love Suydam kits. The cardstock kits are pretty easy to build and look great when finished.
Also it was/is hard to find Southern California style buildings in model railroading (HO scale). Most HO building architecture is based on midwest or east coast prototypes…or European.
Here are some of the old Suydam tract houses on my layout. Unfortuntely the tract houses are not currently in production under Alpine Division Scale Models. But nothing says Southern California like tract houses:
The Sudam metal corrigated kits were my favorite. With a decent weathering job they looked so realistic. I also liked the mat board kits but with the printed exterior finish they did not look nearly as realistic as the metal corrigated kits.
A few years ago there was an E-bay listing for a few of their old metal corrigated kits. The add had no pictures and it was kind of vague as well.It mentioned that the kits had been opened and that there was no way to know if all the parts were there. It turned out only one of the kits in fact had been opened and all parts were in fact there.
I thought I was bidding on a roundhouse and also a add on kit for the roundhouse and also the American Chemical and Potash building. I won that auction and I received two of each of the kits and also two Wyoming Coal Mine kits, which had not even been mentioned in the add.
I still have those kits sitting in my closet. I really need to do something about the hoard of kits I have sitting in my close, a bunch of Campbell kits as well.
