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!

N Scale Office Furniture

Do you know what you can't buy in N Scale?

Office furniture.

Park benches? Yes!
Japanese food stands? Yes!
Oktoberfest details? Yes?
Office furniture? No.

Its as if the N Scale world excludes any 'white color' occupations! Which is a shame really, because Kato, Tomix, and Greenmax have really done some great N Scale buildings (1/150 scale at least) with big wide, modern looking windows which - to my eye - look somewhat naked with nothing going on 'inside'! One creative solution is to add various window treatments (I think there are some commercially available products out there that allow you to fill windows with illustrations, etc..), or to 'blur' them with some spray paint technique (dullcoat or specific products for this from hardware stores).

These approaches work okay for some buildings....the Vollmer and Kibri kits come with a pre-printed color sheet of paper that you insert into the building behind the windows which actually looks convincingly like drapes and window coverings when backlit with lighting. And for larger buildings, I've gone with a more 'suggestive' approach of blacking out some windows, and 'fogging' the rest with some 'glass fogging' spray paint from the hardware store. But these approaches don't work great for all of the buildings, so its time to get creative.

I decided I would create my own N scale office cubicles to fill some of the floors of my modern office structures (which, of course, are brightly lit). This was actually a pretty simple and easy exercise.

The simplest method I came up with requires two basic materials: A 1/2" or 12mm wide strip of styrene, and a 90 degree corner piece of styrene.

The flat styrene is cut to make squares or rectangles of slightly less than 1/2" or 9mm, and then cut a piece of the 90 degree styrene corner piece to 10-12mm (again, about a half inch or less). Then glue the corner piece end to the face of the flat styrene 'square' piece so that it is flush on the edge. The picture shows this better than I can explain it!

Once you've assembled a decent batch of these things (after all, a sole 'cubicle' is kind of a contradiction), I set them on a strip of masking tape and gave them a nice coat of a nuetral, boring color appropriate for the modern office environment.

Given all the excess stickers I find with the above mentioned Kato, Tomix, Greenmax kits, I use these stickers to add some color to the cube walls.

Wallah! Now that you have your cube, get to work! :-)

Okay wait, something's missing! Where do our little N Scale yuppies sit! This was a harder one for me to figure out, and I don't think the end result is as convincing as I wanted. Nevertheless, I used some Styrene I-beams, and cut them into about 1/8 inch pieces (or 4mm). I then used my trusty Xacto knife to carve the top portion into a U shape (which will be the 'seat') and gave a little trim to the center of the I-beam to hide the I-beam look. Is it a chair? Well, they lack backs and arms, but if a figure is glued to it, its unlikely that will be significant except to the most discerning eye. But did I succeed? I don't know. I think I've created the first scale model of toilets more than anything!

The proof is in the pudding (whatever that means), and when its all put together, I think it turned out okay.

Creating Sidewalks

Having (finally) come to a point where I think have 'enough' (is there really ever enough? :-) ) buildings to start putting my city together, the question of how to tie together various buildings- from different manufacturers- needs to finally be answered. Specifically, how to create a city scene with consistent looking sidewalks especially since most manufacturers have various ways of adding (or not) this feature to the structure.

Its very apparent that just using the 'default' sidewalks from various structures, and patching the gaps for those buildings without sidewalks, just won't look right. You also may, as I do, want to add street lights and other features. Additionally, given that every building in my city now has electricity (this is a modern city after all!) that means a LOT of wires need to be managed.

My solution is to create 'city blocks' that will have all the various buildings attached to the 'block' and allow for me to create a consistent sidewalk look. In addition, by unifying multiple buildings on one piece of 'city block', I can more easily manage the various electrical wires and connections.

In order to have 'sidewalks' that sit flat, are sturdy enough to hold multiple buildings, and stand up to the drilling etc... (to allow for the holes for the electrical wires) it has to be thin and rigid. The best choice I found is 1.5mm styrene sheets. According to some online scale calculators I used, where 1.9mm = 1 foot, then my sidewalk height is around 7 inches, which seems to be about right (and visually it looks good, see photo next to car).

As for how to set up my city block, I tried different combinations of buildings; looking for the best combination of height, width, and length, to give the appropriate affect. The photo shows a mock up of what I think will be 'city block #1'. The overall dimensions of this block are 8" x 16", a second block (not shown) is a bit wider at 9" x 16".

After determining the dimensions for my city blocks, I carefully cut the corners using a coin as a guide. I then made very light 'grooves' in the styrene for the sidewalk markings. I made a very small 'outline' for the curb around the entire outside edge, and then added in a grid of small, light grooves with the hobby knife for the main sidewalk part itself.

I used a 'concrete' colored spray paint from the local hobby shop. After that dried, I used some diluted Citadel black and brown ink (the Games Workshop brand, but I think any dilated paint would work just as well) to darken the grooves I made with the knife earlier.

I'll post some photos of the sidewalks and 'city blocks' once I've attached the buildings (the plan is to use hot glue to attach them, but not sure how well that will work) lights, and everything is all wired up!