Making Model Railway Buildings By Andy McMillan

This invaluable book, written by a professional model railway builder, is essential reading for all railway modellers, whatever their level of expertise. The author provides an overall understanding of the purpose of making buildings for a model railway and covers their construction, their positioning and how to light them. Topics covered: • Railway and non-railway model buildings, explaining how the latter can also enhance your trains • Modelling attitudes, the use of scale, levels of detail and both regional vernacular and railway architecture • Ready-made buildings that you can buy and demonstrates how you can adapt them to your own particular purposes • Different materials available for building structures and ways of choosing, finding, measuring and recording suitable prototypes • Step-by-step construction of a cardboard building kit to illustrate the use of basic modelling tools and to explain essential procedures and techniques • Using and modifying 'out-of-the-box' model buildings and explores the subtleties of making model railway buildings from scratch without the use of a kit, or anything more than hand-tools and a few sheets of suitable material • Guidance on the appropriate use of texture and colour, and shows how walls, doors, windows, roofs and chimneys can be created, painted, detailed and finished off • Many aspects of lighting, including external lighting, such as street and platform lights, and the internal lighting of buildings, the problems they pose and how they can be resolved • Lighting can create dramatic effects with reference, for example, to the installation of illuminated ground signals in N-gauge using the latest 'surface-mount' technology, and by producing brilliantly illuminated back-lit sunsets