While my car was being attended to by the Rutland Hand Car Wash team, I wandered around the back of the old garage they occupy, and spotted these rather nice, and very modelable, workshops.
They don't look that old, and the basic design ought to make for an easy scratchbuild. Brick Plastikard walls and Wills corrugated asbestos roofs to my mind. Those sliding doors applied to the outside of the building wouldn't be hard to make either.
OK, there's no great architectural merit here, but the world is full of these sort of anonymous buildings, which means our layouts should be too.
Looking at the one on the left, I probably have most of the bits in stock (ie hoarded) to build it, in 00 or N. The planked(?) door with letter flap is slightly unusual, the uPVC window wouldn't even need painting if you used one moulded in white plastic, and the bricks are about the same colour as those on our (mid-60s) house. There's an American company (Rix?) that make kits for modern buildings in H0 and N and used to sell a lot of the parts separately...I've certainly used their roller shutter door to "update" an old Pola garage kit and have a similar window somewhere too.
ReplyDeleteI like the differences between the two superficially similar buildings, too...
I think it's the subtle differences that would make these an interesting model, but it needs observation to do just enough to ring the changes, but not too much.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure about "the world is full of these sort of anonymous buildings, which means our layouts should be too." After all, most of normal life is a little dull, often repetitive, sometimes rambling, and full of irrelevancies, but when we write fiction we omit much of that in favour of some drama.
ReplyDeleteSo should our model railways be utterly faithful depictions of the real world, anonymous buildings and all, or should they have a little drama and excitement?
Colin - A little, but too much looks odd. It's a bit like the way railway modellers love big cranes and unusual rolling stock, but if the layout is to look authentic, you need lots of mundane wagons.
ReplyDeleteIn the same way that we could fill our layout with cathedrals, but it wouldn't look right. IMHO, you need a certain amount of mundane so the interesting stuff stands out.