Town & City Structures

Excellent article! Definitely a good example of thinking outside the box. When I first saw the lead photo, I thought it would be about huge buildings, which would not be realistic on my layout. However, Mr. Roseman did a brilliant thing with the kit, and now I'm thinking about doing something similar with that kit or some others I have sitting around. One of the best scratchbuilding articles I have read.

Great article

Great article! I’ve been impressed with your work since I was a kid browsing the Walthers catalogs in the early 80s. 

Clever

Very innovative - five kits in one!

realistic structures

Mr. Roseman's additions to the city structures made for a fantastic article. His use of photo or atr work on card stock showed a simple way to improve any structure . He shows how to make any building unique .

Neat idea, but I was very

Neat idea, but I was very disappointed one of the few N scale articles was basically just a commercial pitch for a building kit.

Nice Easter Egg hidden in the article

I enjoyed the article for what it was - a way to look at a kit and pull it apart for a variety of uses. That being said, it was a good look at repurposing a kit I would otherwise not even think of examining.  I've a couple of other kits I've been looking at in a similar way, primarily in terms of kitbashing into a series of background flats.  Some of the techniques shown in changing the hotel kit around can be used on other kits I have in my stash.

I got a kick out of the reference to the Hotel Rexford.  A fun addition would be to list Fred Allen as the head baker on the sign for the hotel coffee shop, and a couple "Reserved Space" signs on the parking lot for Clair Hutchins and Stan Slavin as hotel employees.

(For those of you baffled by this, I've been playing the game "Fallout 4" recently.  One location in the game is the Hotel Rexford, and there are a couple named characters that can be found inside.)

Janet N.

Ladies and gentlemen-Thank

Ladies and gentlemen-

Thank you all for your comments- I am glad that so many of you get the idea of I was showing.  Peter- I am sorry you were disappointed in my article, Building model trains and structures encompasses a wide range of subjects and fields of interest.  I think there is a place for this kind of article, especially in a publication that also features many other kinds of construction all the way up to real scratchbuilding pieces. This article suggests some very easy work,  but it could be a basis for more advanced modeling such as making etched brass fences for the walkways, adding chimneys or rooftop water towers. The apartment blocks I showed include some pretty austere ones, such as prototypes built during World War II, but I think that it is easy to envision these with some nice plantings around them, or with awnings and more elaborate cornices to dress them up. I hope the variety of what I have shown in this little piece will suggest some of what could be done with this one kit.  My concept was to create some structures, most of which are not available.  Setting the painted sections out to dry suggested more ways to use this kit that would be an easy way to get some useful urban structures.  -Best wishes to all, and thank you for reading MRH!      -V.S. Roseman

MRH has done it again

This was an impressive article and pictorial from V.S. Roseman full of useful scratchbuilding tips that I can't wait to put to use.  Repurposing the single large kit, building it out in multiple stand alone structures could jumpstart any scenery build, particularly if you are looking to vary the look of your structures around a layout.

I plan to experiment with aluminum foil face glued and edge wrapped around card stock to model commercial door frames thanks to the inspiration of VSR.