Buildings and Building The City

Ahhh... Fall! While many of my American readers are thinking "Football!", for me, the cool air and shorter daylight means more time to spend on the layout! My current focus is downtown and the revisions I'm making to the layout driven by a desire for a more interesting, colorful and fun 'downtown'/ urban area on my layout (I spoke about this a bit here).

The image at top shows what sort of 'chaos' the layout is in right now...in fact, all trains have been removed and safely boxed up! What I am doing in the photo above is continuing to work on getting all of the various buildings I have to neatly align to more or less similar sized city 'blocks' (as I talked about here).

Today, I've been using a hot glue gun to attach the buildings together. I wasn't sure how I was going to do this, but hot glue seems to be the answer. The photo below shows the buildings in variuos stages of getting connected to each other. The wood boards are used to prop up the buildings so the wiring for all the lights doesn't get in the way and result in the buildings being unevenly attached.

The below photo is just another close up of the buildings


In addition to putting together the city blocks, I'm also 'modding' out the buildings that haven't seen any attention yet. I recently won a neat lot of older German N scale buildings (Kibri, Vollmer, etc...) and am now updating with new paint, lights, advertising, people, and other details. The below was a fairly simple building, but lights and some minimal detail have made this one of my favorites! :-)


Believe it or not, this building has 12 LED's in it! 4 for the 'backlit' "Super 24" sign, 2 SMD's for signs/advertising, 2 more for the rooftop billboard, 3 for the store interior, and one to backlight the upstairs apartments.








This is another building from my eBay 'score' that will need some work. The 'paper backing' for the upstairs apartment windows works fine, but for the ground floor shop display windows, I'll need to something a bit more interesting. Fortunately I just got a new shipment of LED's and resistors so I can start to add the lighting soon!

Okay, enough blogging...it's a rainy Saturday afternoon, the family is all out doing what they like to do...so I'm back to train room!