Model Railroading on the Cheap

Holden Bank Scene

Here is a scene found in downtown Holden City almost any day of the week.

   The time is shortly after 9AM. Folks are coming to the bank. The bank building has smooth polished marble facing, made by printing the homemade graphic on glossy photo paper. No two of those multiple colored marble panels are exactly alike, and the stepped entrance.  It is rumored that the lady in the blue dress with her purse has a lot of money. The street pavement in the foreground is painted card stock paper. The ‘embedded’ rails lead to Holden freight station. The embedding was done by raising the paper pavement with heavy cardboard stripes underneath.

   It looks like the policeman is about to ticket the cab driver for parking at the yellow curb. It must be a universal law – no parking in front of a bank. The cabbie is defensive; most of the car is not at the yellow curb. All these building flats were drawn and printed with the home computer and printer with the free Paint program.

Holden Big Shipment

     Normally the freight agent at Holden handles mostly lcl packaged freight for the offices in Holden City. Today things are different. With the Cheatem Office expansion into the new space afforded by the building of two floors of new office space in the old bridge work – more electrical power capacity was needed for those new offices. Today we see snarled vehicle traffic with the arrival the big transformer to provide that needed power. This shipment was accompanied by the rail born crane from the Hillton Car Shop to off load the transformer to the low boy truck for final delivery to around back of the Cheatem Office Building.

   Here is a nice look at the American Flag over the entrance of the Holden Bank. This was made by scanning the cover of a book of postage stamps with the fluttering flag – then with software copy, reverse, paste, print, scissor, fold and glue over a stiff wire mounted on the wall of the bank building.

   This shipment is special to me because of the car upon which it is done. It is by A. C. Gilbert (American Flyer). They did a few pieces in HO in the 1950s, but competition with Mantua and Varney was tough to beat and never got well established with volume production. I found this cast metal car at an antique market and paid good money for it. Of course it had the original poor quality trucks with molded one piece plastic wheels and axles with razor sharp flanges and one piece cast metal trucks, and Talgo X2F (NMRA) couplers which I promptly replaced with quality metal wheel sprung trucks and body mounted KaDee couplers. This same car with the same load and road name was also available in S scale, as was most of Gilbert’s HO work.

   Molded on the bottom of this HO scale cast metal car is “A C Gilbert, New Haven Conn. “P9446”. They competed with Lionel on 3 rail track before World War II.  Then after the war they introduced S scale (1:64) and two rail tinplate track. They had a nice line of 3/16 scale trains and tried a bit with HO in the 1950s. (My first layout was with American Flyer S scale)  But they did not gain much volume with HO. This car is from their line of HO scale cast metal trains.

   I enjoyed up grading this car from 50 years ago and now am enjoying writing a story about it for others to enjoy or not. With proper quality trucks it is a good looking and good running car that you can’t buy today. I repainted the load light gray to get rid of the chipped paint. These two pictures were done at differing times; it looks like the traffic snarl found a different way to go. This later picture is of greater resolution.