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.