Paper Buildings

I've been playing around with variations on how the Malabar shelf project will be configured, which the combination of sectional track and lightweight building flats makes very easy. I decided to break up the simple four-track ladder arrangement with a couple of tweaks, which gave me a chance to incorporate a paper building project I did maybe 15 years ago, a grain elevator.

This used paper building sheets from a short-lived company called Paper Creek Models. I got all the product I could from this guy. There were lots of variations on pre-weathered building sheets. In this case, I followed plans I found in RMC for a small grain elevator located in Colorado. I used heavy cardboard called museum board from an art supply store for the basic form and applied the paper to it, followed by wood and cardboard trim and a few plastic windows.

Paper Creek also did whole building kits. They had some ghost town structures based on prototypes in a real ghost town, Randsburg, CA. These make up a lot of the town of Terrible on my layout.

I used Paper Creek papers to build a lot of simple structures from plans I found in MR and RMC. Here's a Lackawanna ice house from a 1960s MR drawing:

Here's a Reading two-story section house from an MR drawing from the early 1950s. The windows, doors, and steps came from Grandt Line, which is now closing down. The coal box was urethane from some other supplier.

The brick low-relief warehouse here uses Paper Creek brick paper. It follows a structure I found in Petaluma, CA. It housed a chicken feed dealer at one time. I made the star-shaped iron reinforcing bolts on the corners from star-shaped sequins. I had a real time locating these -- it used to be you could get stuff like this from Michaels or Hobby Lobby, but no more! I finally found a place that had them on the web.

Here's a pair of SP speeder sheds. The sign on one reads DIESEL ENGINE WATER, which I found in a prototype photo and really like!

Here's an engine house based on a Milwaukee Road prototype in an RMC drawing. The Paper Creek building paper made it easy to reproduce the different colored siding on the prototype.

Here's an Illinois Central section shed from an RMC drawing:

I did this one from the same MR drawing of a Lackawanna ice house as the one above, but I did this 50 years earlier. I was using shirt cardboard for the main walls and file card stock cut into strips for battens at the time. I refurbished it at the same time as I did most of these others, but I stiffened it with a rectangle of museum board at the base and airbrushed a new coat of paint to seal it. It's held up pretty well!