Buildings

My West Bottoms layout is going to require a lot of big buildings. I bought enough DPM pieces to make one of the signiture buildings the Crooks warehouse and almost choked on what I have invested in this. It doesn't seem to bother me that much to drop big bucks on locomotives, but for just to get the trackside of one building made me pause if I had bitten off more than I could chew.

I found a product that may be an inexpensive solution. It is called Model Builder by Evans Designs. You just pick out siding you want, bricks in my case, and drop in windows, doors, etc. from an inventory in the program. It is easy to square it up so all the windows so they are in alignment. I built the Rudy Patrick building at the corner of Santa Fe and about 8th Street, the one with the curved back that the Frisco went around. If looked pretty **** good, even though I managed to leave part of a finger on my cutting pad.

So I moved on to the Universal Supply Building down around 9th Street.
I just could not get the windows, doors to match anything that looked like the real thing. But then I discovered you could take a picture of building features, clean them up in Photoshop, and drop them into Model Builder. You can also resize them in the program.

This is not a solution for everyone, but if you have a lot of buildings it appears this will work espeically if you add some three dimensional detail like cutting out the doors, fire escapes, loading docks etc. It least it will may the Ol' Plywood Pacific look like a railroad until I get everything scratchbuilt, if ever.

John

 

You might have a look at this website for building back drops: http://www.kingmill.com/

Tom