Side Shot Saturday - New Thread

Having completed my extraordinary Burger/Beer Train expedition (see preceding post) I have come back inspired to the point of completing my main passenger car display with the three most interesting models I have:



The perspective gives the wrong impression as all of these are the same length (20 plus inches) although two are Euro O scale at 1/43.5. I think that this is probably the limit of what I will source of cars of that kind because of space and other limitations but they are placed where I can see and be distracted by them whenever I am at the dining table desk/workbench.

That sort of thing from the prewar and early postwar period just fascinate me...thanks for sharing. Seeing examples of stuff folks built with just the basics of components is pretty terrific.

Dedication of the new Lewis Park Station was held today, and it was a PR disaster. These two showed up, but nary another soul:



Heads are gonna roll at the home office.

They were never that clean!  Love the paint scheme  though!!

Dave

Definitely true! They were really beat up too! Penn Central definitely didn’t donate nice locomotives to the NJ DOT…

Tom

While I'd promised to take a break from making any new cardboard faux-tin for awhile, mopac flipped me a web-shot of someone's effort to make a garage to mate with a Lionel 184 bungalow. After a bit of pondering, we decided to take a crack at making one similar using the matt-board/cardstock/paper construction method.

Using Paul Race's graphics from his "Tin-Style Cottage" project kit, I mucked around with MS Paint to come up with a version of the garage that would sorta match the look of an original Lionel bungalow (the early version with the vines/shrubbery lithography). I drew a pair of vintage-style garage doors using Paint, similar to the ones the original designer came up with. Print/assembly was the standard process...cut out the windows and doors, paint the matt board edges, than paste a cardstock copy in from behind to add a bit of depth to the otherwise slab-sided graphics. The roof paper I similarly printed from Paul's Tribute to Tinplate site under "Tinplate Textures". The base is a scrap of masonite from the shop, covered in dyed sawdust as manufactured by Life-Like some 20 years ago (fortunately I have a couple boxes of that stuff purchased before Life-Like went away). I recall my grandfather making his own in a bucket in the basement; a bit of sawdust from the shop floor, some water and green RIT dye, and a stirrer "borrowed" from my grandmother's kitchen. A couple weeks later it was dry and ready for use to scenic his under-Christmas tree putz...but I digress.

Anyway, here's what we came up with. Upper left is the pic provided by the original designer, upper right is our version, and lower is a two-bungalow plot with one cottage replaced by the garage:





The lithography on the original bungalow on the plot looks pretty dark, likely the result of getting a coat of varnish by a previous owner at some point. It should appear quite a bit lighter than that, although probably not as light as the color used on the garage. I have a couple of Lionel prewar tunnels that got a similar varnish coat at some point in their lives, a treatment I think folks thought would preserve the painted finish. Unfortunately, the varnish darkens considerably over time.

Here's another pic of an original 184 compared to the garage graphics...still a bit too light and yellow, at least in the photos:





The three bungalows I have all are repros of the late version, having just a simple single-color enamel finish (no lithography). I'll have to see if I can find an early one with a less faded and unvarnished lithographed finish so we can try to better match it up.

mopac can provide details on his two-bungalow plot. I can't remember if this is an original or one of the repros made by a brave few over the years. If a repro, lots of good work replicating Lionel's scenic technique there. I know the only one I have is a half-plot made by Joe Mania some 2-3 decades ago, the materials much the same.

Anyway, another fun project. Now back to cleaning up the basement layout.