and now for something completely different!
while hunting for miscellaneous windows and doors for the engine house project I found a junk box. In that junk box was one of those ubiquitous model buildings, who's moulds made the rounds, and it was produced under many labels.
I remember it being marketed as "Ma's place." I built this one when I was in high school, and it was the only building in a tank town on the RR I had as a Teenager in Atlanta. GA the town consisted of this building, a water tank and a woodpile.
That RR was torn down by my dad (I was away @ Sewanee TN. in college) in 1977. this building has not been on a RR since. My first inclination was to carry it to the club, but I think we have two identical buildings there already.
I decided to cut it into two smaller buildings. I have been working to come up with more small buildings in order to increase the apparent population of Perry's Gizzard and the Ridgemont Tn. / State Line GA. area. The later is only a foot wide at places so flats on the backdrop are in order to try to make the place look like a place that might be the terminus of several railroads.
I cut the store front off the cabin, and then cut the store front down to a flat a couple inches deep. the back wall from the store section, now discarded was cut down to use as the missing end wall of the cabin.
This kitbashing from a built structure is something I have been doing a lot of, as at the club sometimes we have two or three of the same building, often in disrepair, or missing pieces, and so reconfiguring them is an interesting challenge. typically the parts you want to use fall apart at the seams, and the joints you want to separate are completely fused and must be cut with a razor saw.
This is also similar to what I'm doing to my house. I live in a farmhouse that is at least 130 years old. When a bathroom was added they used the back porch, and my wife and I are working on rebuilding the bathroom. We have discovered that whoever built the wall that enclosed the back porch did a spectacularly poor job (the wall is not attached in any meaningful way to the floor, and there is no overhang on the roof to protect it from moisture.) . That and perhaps fifty years have made that wall completely un-fixable. so we are tearing out the wall, returning to a back porch ( we can do this now that we have another bath and a half), and starting over, hopefully with a better understanding of the principles of basic carpentry and the laws of physics.
Bill Nelson