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Suzanne and her friend Janine enjoy a cool beverage on
Suzanne's porch while they wait for their husbands to come home from the mines.
These are HO figures on the porch of an HO house; the figures at the bottom of
the image are S scale. What do you think?
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Keith Hayes - The Leadville
image featured rows of shotgun houses, so called because you could stand at the
front door with a shotgun and shoot it though the back door through each of the
successive rooms. Leadville homes often were distinguished by a bay window.
Though I found a number of kits that filled the bill, I still needed to make
some homes to fill the gap. Shotgun houses tend to be much longer in life than
the models available
A Grandt kit
filled the bill for one of the houses—No Problem Joe’s. This house worked in the center of the scene.
I still needed a house behind the grocery. Grandt also offers “grab bags,”
packages of random architectural details which are great for projects like
these: it is like a starter kit for your scrap box. I had a couple grab bags on
hand, and got some styrene sheet out. I laid out the gable ends, found a nice
front door and studied the windows to figure out which ones could be combined
to make a bay window. The selected windows were glued together with styrene
shapes at the corners, which doubled as bracing and trim: voila! a bay window.
For another house,
I went back to the N scale Grandt kits and glued two wall sides together to
create a longer shotgun. The Reese Street kits also have some shed additions,
and I used these to add to some of the other kits I built to add some variety
to the rear of the houses that would face the room. I glued a couple together
to create an outbuilding. The Reese Street kits also include some outhouses,
and these were painted to match their houses.
The houses feature
a variety of roof covering. I used the cast wood shingles for a couple. Others
had a rolled roof. I also got some Wild West shingles in several scales and
colors and applied them following the directions. Oh, I did use a Sharpie to
paint the roof edges and ridge black prior to applying the shingles.
When I laid out
the street in foam I also made the home lots. As I was contouring the foam, I
placed the houses and carved the foundations. To provide some variety, some of
the foundations are smooth to simulate concrete; for other buildings I carved
in lines and painted the foam to look like stone.
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Working like a developer, I cut the lot for each home out as
an individual. Leadville lots were 15' x 105'. I shimmed the top to the right
level, and cut the foam to match the outline of the house. Depending upon how
much of the foundation would be visible, I also textured the foundation to
simulate either stone or concrete. The 'wedge' shape of the street is clear
here too.
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All the foam lots have been glued together, painted and a
layer of sand applied. Where the joints did not line up, I applied Matte Medium
to smooth out the unruly joints and make final adjustments. This was followed
by more tan latex paint and a gentle sprinkling of sand.
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The houses are lined up behind Carleno's Grocery. The first
two on the left are scratch built; the next two are Grandt models in HO and N
respectively and the model to the right is an N or Z scale laser cut wood model
of a shotgun house. You can see even from this angle the visual deception
works.
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I decided that the N scale Grandt kit was too short in plan,
and glued two kits together to make a longer house. I added a Wild West Models
corrugated roof. Suzanne's house (second from left) is getting a Wild West
shingle roof. I used a wide tip Sharpie to blacken the roof edge before
applying the shingles.
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Keith Hayes
Modeling Leadville in Sn3
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