What are some the stores that one should have and shops you shouldn’t? Cars and trucks? Asphalt or dirt roads? By the way,this layout will probably be a small town out in the country. Thanks, Stephen
Have a very merry Christmas and God bless!![:)]
For buildings, hardware stores, general stores, and barber shops are good. For vehicles, Classic metal works has many good ones available. As for roads, asphalt in cities and suburbs, and dirt mainly for the country.
Merry Christmas
In general, you will want to personalize your shops as ‘Mom-and-Pop’ stores, rather than chain outlets. Only a few industries had a “Standard Oil”-type nationwide dominant company.
You can’t have anything that hasn’t been invented yet; no Radio Shack for instance because computers are still room-size clunkers that cost $tens of thousands each.
A radio station in the upper floor of a building might be a nice touch. WMRR?
Find a book about the 50’s (maybe a Trivial Pursuit?) and look for ideas.
Note that the RR consolidation phase had not yet hit, so you can set the area of your railroad by the off-road cars you introduce. I recommend at least one PRR boxcar; they seem to have gone everywhere.
Many 1940’s and a few shiny-new 1950’s cars, some (well-weathered) 1930’s vehicles.
There was probably one kid in every County High School who got himself a 1957 Chevy hotrod and kept it sparkly clean. Put that outside the Malt shop. 
general store with a post office inside. one storey grade school. voluntary fire dept.
small church. out-house,old barn,chicken coops.
Flip
You could get some Natl Geo, Time, Life, or other mags from the 50’s and see what chain sttores existed. A&P grocery, Woolworth’s, etc but smaller stores with on-street parking in front. May even have space for angle parking on narrow street. Even a Penny or Sears store would be a lot smaller. Malls had yet to be invented. You may not have space to do a downtown square, with a mix of public/private buildings. You may want to do some with 2 story with the dentist upstairs from the barber shop.
something to avoid deals with any history that hasen’t happened yet. Ike for President. No Mustangs (fords),No toyotas, few imported small cars.
Stephan,
I model the Milwaukee Road in the late 50’s(SW Wisconsin). Some of my scenes have some early 60’s, and some of my scenes have stuff that was gone in the early 50’s - I just try to ‘get the feel’. Here are some pointers:
o - Freight cars - look for 40’ cars with a lot of ‘box car red’ paint jobs. Flashy paint schemes just started to arrive, but were not the standard. The ‘flashy’ schemes were basically box car red with ‘slogans’ or large color logo’s at that time.
o - Paved roads usually has white stripes on the centerline(depends on locale), and grade crossing gates were white with black diagonal stripes. The red stripes came later. Also a lot of traffic signs were ‘yellow’…
o - Structures - most homes were ‘white’, and a lot of small town business structures were brick construction with lot’s on sign’s attached to the structure or painted on the walls of the building. The DPM and Walther Cornerstone line are very nice. Liberal use of 50’s era signs(Microscale for example) are great for making that DPM building look different than the other guys…
o - I also have a streach of road scheduled to get a string of ‘Burma Shave’ signs(local upper midwest thing). Look at local maps and pick up on local county/township/state names. I have a Sinsinawa Yard, a Pecatonica river, Badger Oil, Wisconsin Power & Light, and a Tri-State Feed & Milling company on my layout. Most of these names were picked up from ‘tourist’ information of the area. Some folks have looked at my towns and swear they have ‘been there’ and seen the place. The fact is that none of the towns on my layout are models of any particular Milwaukee Road town! I have just mixed/matched familiar scenes that are typical of small SW Wisconsin towns.
I hope this gives you some ideas to work with.
Jim Bernier
not being a child of the 50’s I cannot offer much advice. I did some research on my town thru newspaper articles and lots of pictures. a few things I can tell you
1.) Mini-skirts werent invented yet, keep that in mind when it comes to the ladies on your layout.
2.) most small 50’s era town which had stoplights were mounted from the wires above, not the modern poles we have today.
3.) brick or asphalt roads were the things brick roads were from the 30’s and 40’s but depending on your towns financial situation,
4.) a 2 car garage wasnt very common
5.) swimming pools were few and far between
6.) a city water tower is almost a must, nothing fancy lifelikes blinking water tower will work perfect.
and last but not least
7.) most small towns had REA or a team track
thats my 2 cents, no i"m broke
Merry Christmas to all
jeff
The cars started to get gaudy in the late '50’s, but no imports. Lots of Chevy’s, Plymouths, Mercs, and maybe a DeSoto or two. Convertables were really IN, especially with the younger crowd. In my area (rural mountain California), lots of pickups. Fords, Dodges and Chevy’s. Neighborhood movie theaters, TV hadn’t really taken over until 1959. Believe it or not, Soda Fountains. In drug stores. Mom and Pop stores, except for Wards, Sears & Roebuck, Western Auto and Red & White grocery stores. MacDonald’s hadn’t caught on yet (thank God!) but drive-ins with burgers that tasted as good as they smelled were all over the place, and yes, in some of them, the waitresses roller-skated out to the cars. Parks were cool, especially with some kind of historical statue, preferably on a horse. Park benches where you could neck, but only after dark. Skinny-dipping in a secluded area of the local river was cool, but only if you were an 8-10 year old boy, otherwise it was a scandal. High schools generally looked like two and three-story brick fortresses meant to keep you in all day, not let you out. Auto dealers had showrooms, they didn’t park the good stuff out in an exposed lot. Churches were prominent and well attended. Almost every town had a central air raid shelter where you could go (usually the basement of the court-house) in case the Russians launched an Atomic Bomb. TV antennas got very popular in the very late '50’s. Ranch-style homes started to come into vogue, especially if they had car-ports instead of garages. Oh, and yes–during the Christmas season, every department store worth its name had either Lionel or American Flyer displays in their windows. Electric trains were BIG–that’s one of the ways that Dad and Son communicated, and believe me, having been a survivor of the '50’s, that’s how Dad and I started communicating. It lasted a lifetime.
Hope this helps.
Tom
I agree with all the above, but might add that those burmashave signs were all over the country and that barns were often seen with advertiseing such as " chew mailpouch ". Also might add that most small town shops were two and even three story wood or brick structures where the owners lived above there store. A lot of rural paved roads had no center sripes at all except at curves or intersections and towns. Railroad crossings often had hand cranked gates with a “watchmans” shanty. I remember one small town near where I lived had a four track mainline crossing with those hand crank gates and they hand red kerosene lanterns hanging on them and with the high volume of rail traffic that came through, that watchman earned his pay. I grew up on a dairy farm and our town consisted of about five stores, a feed mill, a railroad depot (mainly freight) and a small park with a two story gazebo. On Saturday nights a band played on the second story and there was enough room for a few couples to dance below. We pretty much went there after milking was finish and took a picnic supper and ate under the trees there. That was basicly our entertanment on Saturday nights. Of coarse us boys were more interested in the trains that came through more then the band. Nough reminising.
The types of roads would depend on what part of the country you’re modeling. In my home town in the '50s, the city streets were brick, concrete, asphalt, dirt, or gob (coal strip mine waste), depending on what part of town you were in. This was a rural town of 3,500 population in Southern Illinois.
Buildings were a brick, two-story county courthouse in the center of the town square, surrounded by brick and wooden buildings, mainly two story, containing a Woolworth’s 5 and 10 cent store, Hirsch’s clothing, two movie theatres, the post office, barber shops, mom and pop restaurants, an independent hardware dealer, a blacksmith, insurance agency, two drug stores, two banks, doctor’s offices, a volunteer fire department, two grocery stores, a ladies’ wear, farm implements dealer, Ford dealership, GMC dealership, and other stores. The upper stories on nearly all of these buildings were apartments or storage space that had to be reached from the back alleyway via rickety wooden stairs.
Streetlights, if they existed at all, were bare high-wattage (200?) bulbs dangling under a metal reflector on the end of an arm sticking out from a wooden pole that also supported all of the electrical and telephone wires.
Check out the RPI railroad clubs page, you’ll find ALOT of information.
http://railroad.union.rpi.edu/
Alvie.
One of the biggest things is mailboxes amd postal vehicles. They were khaki green as well as the uniforms for the workers. Also lots of payphone booths, no interstates, main streest were narrower. Check pictures of trains from the era.
Here’s some very good pictures of the commercial district of a small town in Kentucky (Hazard, about 5000 people now) in the era you speak of:
http://hazardkentucky.com/1950_60.htm (look on the main page http://hazardkentucky.com to get pictures from other eras)
Also note that by 1950 Hazard had progressed to streetlights encased in globes on arms cantilevered from their own (unshared with other utilities) metal poles.
Hazard seems advanced and prosperous for a 1950s small town, more or less at the level of an upscale Long Island suburb of the era.
And best of all, when you go to the Hazard from Home Lumber page (http://hazardkentucky.com/new4/town.jpg) you find…Hazard had rail service [:)] !
Chains I remember
Sears Roebuck and Company
J.C. Penney
F.W. Woolworth
Western Auto
Gas sations:
Shell
Texaco
Beacon
Signal
Drive ins:
A&W Root Beer founded in Lodi CA, franchised in the 1920’s with stores in Central CA, UT, and TX
Dairy Queen, founded in Illinois 1938, had 2600 stores by 1955, I know they were big in west Texas in the late 1960’s, prpbably sooner.
Many chains then as now were regional, bnot national.
Was Beacon ever larger than a regional chain?
In smaller towns in rural areas local merchants often operated the town’s Sears (or Montgomery Ward) catalog store. You went into the store, said “I want one of these” from the catalog and they called it in and it was there to be picked up in a day or two. Most of them were just a regular small town store front with a Sears or Wards sign out front(or in the window). I grew up near St. Louis in the 50s and remember some of the gas stations were: Conoco (different logo than today), Phillips 66(different logo than today-the “66” was actually crooked), Shell, Texaco, Cities Service and a few lesser known ones. Most of them were locally owned, but sold the big oil company’s gas. Ofter the sign had the oil company logo and “Jim’s Conoco” or something like than on it. The further away from the city you got the more likely you were to be able to eat an an “A&W Root Beer Stand” as they were called. I never saw one in the city or in the closer in suburbs. We never heard of pizza till the very late 50s even though Dean Martin had a song in the early 50s with the words “When the moon hits your eye like a big uh pizza pie, thats amore.” We thought he sang “like a big uh piece a pie”. When we did hear about pizza it was called “pizza pie”. I don’t remember any taco places. In fact, I remember our forth grade teacher telling us about her trip to Mexico and explaining that tortillias were sort of like Fritos. None us us had ever eaten a tortilla. We had ONE McDonald’s that I knew of in the very late 50s and the sign read “over 1 million served”. On dates we would go to Steak ‘n Shake so we could eat in the car. Some of the “car hops” were on roller skates. The only flashy paint schemes on freight cars I can remember was the Missouri Pacific box cars in the roads passenger colors (and darn few of them). The car dealers were less likely to carry multiple lines than today. The Ford dealer sold Fords, but the Mercury dealers’ signs all said “Lincoln-Mercury”. You bought your Plymouth from a place where the sign read
Thanks for the tons of info guys! [tup]
great links AlvieCo and Chutton01 !
what kind of antennas were these ? , I remember we had two different kinds on our roof when I was younger: big H like things - VHF I recall - and smaller garden rake style UHF antennas.
on apartment buildings did they have some kind of central antenna system, was it an antenna forrest on the roofs or were the indoor type antennas more in use ?
these VHF things would be easy to create soldering some wires and create lots of detail to the layout rooftops and skyline
Gas stations - Pure Oil [supplied gas at Daytona and other race tracks].
Sunoco- octane went from-190 to 240 and a super high of 260. You
chose what grade you wanted by turning a dial.
Who else remembers that?
Flip
Twinkle,twinkle
one eyed car,
how we
wonder
where you are.
Burma Shave. From Miami to New York and beyond.
Flip
From a child of the 50’s:
UHF TV didn’t come along until the 60’s, for all practical purposes. The outdoor antennas were generally yagi type, with a number of parallel elements of decreasing length on a 4-5’ center bar, or a beam/dipole-type that had one side looking like a X and the other side straight, usually on a 36" +/- to 5’ long spreader bar. Got mounted on roofs and strapped to chimneys. Apartment houses and buildings would sometimes become veritable forests of TV antennas. And they all need to point the same direction (usually the spreader bar points at the station). Out in the country, there were few if any, and those that did exist were usually on tall towers.
Gasoline–don’t forget Sinclair (“dinosaur”) and Gulf, the various Standard Oil derivatives–it was broken up and ESSO was not necessarily the name on the sign–in the SW it was Humble, for example.
I remember home-owned drive-ins with curb service vastly outnumbering any chains you can think of.
A&P everywhere until Safeway sued under Sherman, then Safeways everywhere (I could make a comment on hypocrisy here, but I won’t). Dime stores: Kresge, Mott’s, Woolworth, M.E. Moses. And in virtually every small town at least in the SW, a Western Auto affiliate store.
And if you’re doing TX and probably a few other states as well, the bank was locally owned with no branches (illegal). And nothing but beer joints in wet counties in TX–liquor by the drink was illegal.
Pizza was a non-entity.
Detached 1-car garages.
Local soft drink signs. Lots of RC/Pepsi/Nehi/Dr. Pepper signs in the SW.
And lots of wires and company-owned private phone booths along the tracks, usually at every siding and sometimes in between. Radio was just beginning to get accepted on the RR.
Hope this helps.