Homemade Contemporary-era Building Flats

I enjoy armchair-traveling on Amtrak via YouTube. One thing I've noticed, though, is that the trackside environment no longer looks like the urban backgrounds the commercial hobby suppliers think it does -- there are no longer all that many brick factory or mill buildings next to railroad lines, for instance. Downtown hotels look nothing like they used to, and there are new kinds of structures like concrere parking garages. The suppliers of building flats and urban backgrounds have really been behind the curve, and you really can't order buildings that fit the era of current Amtrak, NJ Transit, or Chicago METRA off the web.

Now and then I've been playing around with saving screen shots off YouTube or other photo sources on the web and seeing if I can make my own building flats that fit the modern era, at least as a stopgap. My first experiment was an N scale compatible flat based on a YouTube screen shot of the Morrow Hotel, which overlooks the Amtrak Northeast Corridor just north of Union Station in Washington. It's posed on a single-wide T-TRAK module in the photo below.

I made it using the cardboard from a Triscuit carton. I printed the screen shot out on ordinary printing paper, glued it to the cardboard using Elmer's glue, pressed the cardboard on a sheet of glass under weights overnight, and assembled the box with more of the carton braced with used fireplace matches.

More recently, I decided to see if I could extend this into a full backdrop that would fit the whole width of a single-wide T-TRAK module, which is 12-1/8". I found a photo of a concrete parking garage that printed out very close to N scale and built a second building flat using a second Triscuit carton the same way:

Right now, this is just a proof-of-concept, but I feel encouraged. Commercial building flats actually need quite a bit of work with Photoshop to edit out perspectve effects and random unwanted details, but the result here is at least a lot closer to what I see riding Amtrak on YouTube, and as I see more opportunities on the web, I'll do other experiments.