Now that my model railroad includes a pre-fab house built from a standard kit, which I showed as a work in progress over ten weeks, it’s time to experiment with a different approach: a compromise between a standard kit and building from scratch. While true building from scratch would involve taking sheets of styrene, strips of wood, etc., and going from there, the compromise construction uses a kit that doesn’t contain entire pre-fab walls and so forth. Showing is better than telling, so let’s look at a couple of the components contained in the box:

As usual, the coin is included to help you judge actual size in this photo.

To get context, think about what you see as you walk down the street IRL and pass a house under construction. At some point you see nothing but a foundation. At another point you see a completed house. In between you never see anything that looks like the photos of the Goldbergs’ new house taken every week while Meredith was building it for my layout. That’s largely because the order of construction of the model is different from real life and because most pieces come premade out of the box.

This kit, however, is an attempt to do something different— to make a realistic model of what you might see as you walk down the street. Something like this:

Here, as you see, the framing is up for all the walls, doors, and windows. That was Week 1. Stay tuned for the next step.

Categories: Model Railroading