Kitbashing Background Flats And More Ghost Signs

I've noted here now and then that a good successor to the now-gone Kingmill line of background building flats is Angie's Trackside Flats. The principle is very similar, photo-realistic images of older brick buildings, many with very appealing details and ghost signs. I've also noticed that modelers, including George Sellios, have been very creative in kitbashing Kingmill flats, but so far, I haven't seen Anglie's Trackside Flats matched with Kingmill.

One of my favorite Anglie's buildings carries a ghost ad for Texas and Pacific "23 Hours to St Louis Free Reclining Chair Car". However, Angie, unlike Kingmill, puts its image directly onto a sheet of foamcore. I find that a paper sheet attached to foamcore is in fact likely to warp, so I like to build a more substantial backing for either Kingmill or Angie's.

Not only do top, side, and bottom pieces stiffen the front, but I put an intermediate horizontal piece inside, backed up by the rear wall, to stiffen the assembly further. So far, I haven't had warping problems with Kingmill buildings roughly this size if I build this type of backing. However, I wanted to add this Anglie's building to a larger Kingmill flat I did several years ago. I found the amount of stiffening I added to the larger Kingmill did lead to a certain amount of warping, but it's still acceptable for a background building. Here are the two assembled into one piece:

My experience with the slight warping on the building to the left led me to use the more substantial form of backing that I now use on the Angie's T&P building.

I've also found a supplier for ghost sign decals that will fit on DPM type buildings, T2 Decals. You can get them most cheaply on Amazon. I do find that they're quite hard to get off the backing, and in fact on the set I got, I had to soak them in water for about half an hour and then use an X-Acto blade to peel the decal away. But it finally came off. Here are two examples on model buildings:

Finally, Blair Line makes business sign sets for DPM type buildings. A couple of sets have lasted me many years. Here's a sign I just recently added to a 25-plus year old DPM building:

A New Subdivision For Bay City

As I was poring through my hundreds of Franklin & South Manchester photos that I've downloaded to my hard drive looking for inspiration, I suddenly remembered a piece of a former layout that I'd begun in the early 1980s that wound up on a closet shelf in the basement. When I pulled it out, I discovered that it had five mostly built structures with it. These were Design Preservation Models kits, and I think at the time I built them, the line was pretty new.

On several, I added dry transfer signs and wall ads from Vintage Reproductions, a company long out of business. Here are two:

I never added "glass" to the windows, so I'll need to do this, as well as add various details to the sides and roofs. I'll probably also add Woodland Scenics Light Diffusing Film and Just Plug LEDs to the interiors.

When I pulled the layout piece out of the closet, I saw that I'd added lighting components of the old incandescent flashlight bulb variety with the intent of lighting all these buildings. I pulled these off, since I'll now be using Just Plug components. Here is the base with the lighting elements removed:

Apparently I found a wood laser cut city sidewalk somewhere, and I used a European cardstock cobblestone street for the road surface. You can see that I also built the street with a slight incline. The photo below shows where I added interior locating strips for the buildings made from used fireplace matches and drilled holes big enough to pass Just Plug lighting plugs through:

I found a spot behind Bay City on my layout where I could just fit this base. I have it shimmed more or less level. I may or may not need to do some more work to steady it and level it up. Here's a shot with two more of the buildings from the closet mounted on it in place:

So now I'll have quite a bit to keep me busy finishing the scene.

Layout Maintenance And Upgrades For DCC Operation

The oldest part of this layout is 30 years old, and in its current location, it's 25. Inevitably solder joints come loose, screws loosen, wood warps, paint fades, and so forth. The upside is that once I began converting to DCC, many necessary renewal projects can come with DCC conversion benefits. Most recently, I had a switch machine power connection come unsoldered, but decided that rather than just repair the old connection, I would simply replace it with DCC control of the switch via a stationary decoder, in this case a Dgitrax DS52.

As it happens, I had a panel that had previously mounted an Atlas Selector with a gang of Atlas Controllers for analog DC operation of staging tracks. I uninstalled these as part of the journey to DCC and have largely dispersed the Atlas components to friends still on analog, But then it occurred to me that the old panel could now be used to mount DS52s for this part of the layout. Here's the result:

You can see the NCE handheld radio controller on the right, with the switch address on it. This makes switching much, much easier, since the local panel shown below is about eight feet away, and I would have to keep walking back and forth from the local panel to the train to throw switches. Now I just throw them from the handheld.

There's room for another trwo DS52s, which will control another four switches on this part of the layout. The whole thing is visible and accessible without climbing under the layout. Below is the former local panel that controlled these switches and the analog DC blocks:

Right now, the panel is just hanging by one screw, since replacement of the switch and block toggles is under way. Unfortunately, the switch toggles on the upper routes are going to have to stay, as they control European style switch machines for the European prototype on that part of the layout. I used those because there wasn't enough clearance below those tracks to install Tortoises, and the European switch machines don't work with typical DCC stationary decoders, since they are screw control.

If I were redoing that part of the layout, I'd either use the new Walthers switch machines, which can be mounted sideways, or Kato Unitrack. Probably Unitrack on balance. But I probably won't have to consider redoing things there, at least I hope not.

I'll leave all the local panels in place, covering the old holes for the switch toggles with paper labels giving the new decoder addresses for the switches as shown.

More Work With Foamcore Buildings

I've been playing around some more with the possibilities of finding building images on the web that can be downloaded, sized to model railroad scales, and glued to foamcore building shapes.

One of the big obstacles to doing this is the effect of perspective and lens distortion on the images. Unless the subjects are very small or very distant, the images won't be the rectangles or right angles we expect to see on a model. There are ways around this, which include selecting smaller parts of the image, finding images that have had the distortion minimized, or using software to correct the image. In my experiments, I've found two productive directions. One is to find sites that specialize in ghost signs. The photographers often take care to record the signs head-on as much as possible, and the photos often include other parts of the building, like windows and doors. Here are some examples:

One of the best sites is drkenjones.com. This photographer takes great care to square up his images, I believe by taking multiple photos of small areas on each building and then stitching them together. As a result, he sometimes creates whole walls, like in the examples here:

I was able to download the Roberts Hardware immediately above, print it out, measure the height distance on the image between the windowsills on two floors, and determine how much to reduce the image to N scale, assuming the height between floors is 12 feet. Then I built a form to those dimensions, measuring from the image, from foamcore to attach the image to.

This gets me to a front wall. But finding and downloading other ghost sign images on the web, I can easily find and resize images that can be used for side walls. I did this with an N scale Joe's Pizza building that I did using a front wall image I found on Facebook. I was able to add to the effect by using ghost sign images that I resized to fit the area I needed:

The roof can be detailed using more conventional model railroad roof techniques.

This technique isn't perfect. One difficulty I've found is that using spray adhesive, you have to set the image in place perfectly the first time, there's no leeway to adjust it. As a result, I've tried various techniques with diluted white glue to attach it to the foamcore with a little time to adjust the position. The best way I've found so far is to use Elmer's School Glue to tack the image in place at two corners and make sure it fits properly. Then I use two other dabs of Elmer's School Glue to tack the other two corners down. Then I use a cotton swab with diluted Elmer's regular white glue to soak the paper. As it dries, this will shrink the image into palace flat onto the foamcore.

The problem with this approach is that it will cause the ink to run slightly and also fade the image slightly. So far, I can accept this, since these will be temporary and/or background buildings. The upside is that even factoring in the cost of foamcore, glue, paper, and ink, each building costs well under a dollar.