From rehash to remarkable

At some point as a model railroader, you find certain aspects of the hobby that are your area of specific interest. For some, it is operations. Others prefer building structures, and others yet enjoy DCC programming and the electronic side of things. The beauty of model railroading is that you can bounce around from project to project if you would like to, and get in a little taste of everything. This develops a highly varied skill set, and you learn far more than you would in say, knitting. Personally, I love building models - be it rolling stock or structures - from kits or scratchbuilding, so that I end up with something unique for my layout or modules. Unfortunately, too often modelers take what they can get and just use it in the form it was purchased in. This is why you see the same structures and rolling stock over and over in the pages of MR and RMC. Its called "STBS" - "Shake The Box Syndrome", where modelers just assemble whats in the box exactly as the instructions indicate. If you're happy with that, and it suits your abilities, then great - enjoy! However, there more you can do, you just have to think outside that box!

I like to revisit old projects and "spruce them up" to avoid this problem. 10 or 15 years ago, I followed those instructions to the letter and built many Walthers Cornerstone buildings. They're great kits, and when starting out they make creating a large structure far less duanting than using DPM wall sections or plaster castings. One of my earliest jobs was the good old George Roberts Printing Company. You remember this one - SO cool because it had the indoor dock for loading & unloading, despite the building not being that much longer than a boxcar anyway! Well, I assembled & painted it something like this:



When I started working on the new layout, I couldn't really find a spot for this, and I hate it when people end up designing a railroad around the footprint of their stock of assembled structures. So out came the razor saw, with the intent of making this into a background building along the yard. Essentially, I disassembled the structure at the wall joints, resulting in a series of flat panels. These were then toyed with until a suitable arrangement was found. The part of the structure that wold have been over the tracks wasn't appealing to me, with the closed sides. So I grabbed some drinking straws on a trip to the local burger joint, a couple pieces of scrap wire, and made a series of concrete columns with steel rod bracing between them.



Some styrene strips were used around the base of the overhanging floors to conceal the connection, and then I built up some blocking from styrene for the column bases. From there I popped out the windows as best I could, choosing to leave them in the molded color as they came in the kit. I grabbed an extra loading door from the scrap box, and some corrugated metal for patch work in a couple of places, which were painted before the rest of the structure, and installed later. I wanted to create a gray brick and concrete structure, so I studied a bunch of photos on line to see what sort of colors and tones were prevalent. I sprayed the newly formed structure with Rustoleum Gray Auto primer, then brush-painted Badger "Concrete" onto the pilasters and beams. With that color applied, I mixed up a few random tones of gray, brown, and white paints to highlight individual bricks here and there. This was followed by weathering with AIM powders to show some age, dust, and grime. I added some decals of graffiti and signage from my collection, though admittedly I need a new sign for the top of the building once I can dig up some old logos from the late 1970's.



I stepped back and looked at the project, thinking that it still looked like it needed some things. Then I remembered some photos I took on a visit to Amsterdam, NY where there's a treasure trove of old warehouses and factories still in use. In particular, notice the windows:



Unfortunately, I wasn't about to take the time or expense to replace the windows that came with the kit. But knowing that you wouldn't see any light through them, I cut out scraps from a black cardboard box to cover the backs of the windows. Before attaching them, I raided the kids' construction paper and grabbed some bright colors to glue in random individual panes to replicate replacement glass that had been added over the years. When BLMA released their etched metal air conditioners a while back I bought a set, and this was a perfect opportunity to use one, where the original window frame had broken. Perhaps a shift boss was getting too warm up there on the 3rd floor.

Some minor touch-up weathering work, a couple of roof vents, and fixing of scenery around the base, and we're done for now. Still some work to be done on the track and getting rid of the awful color left by some paint pens I tried. But this short project ( only took a week of evenings at the most ) renders a great structure along a wall, and it cost me absolutely nothing to create. For a sense of scale, this is where it now sits, affixed to the backdrop:



I have since done similar work with a pair of Front Street Warehouse kits, and with that project nowhere close to being finished, I'll try to post some in-progress shots along the way.

So dig through the bins of old structures and have at it. Chances are if they're sitting in a box somewhere, they're not doing you much good anyway. There's nothing to lose except for perhaps a miscut wall, and the potential of gaining a one of a kind structure for your layout.