I built ITLA Models O Scale Kit #5156 - Olympia Tool & Die Company - during October and November 2018. I wanted a brick factory building to be the focal point of a scene on the only unfinished area of my 10’-by-5’ model railroad – a corner. Although the model is now finished, I’m not sure that it will go onto that corner or the layout and I’m looking for something else that might be better in that spot.
Here are a few pictures of the completed model – on that unfinished corner of the railroad. The rooftop billboard sign reads “Hughes-Treitler,” which is a company where my father worked for more than forty years. I also added a water tank and a scratch-built shed on the roof.
The eight exterior wall panels are made of 1/8-inch-thick fiberboard with laser-engraved foundation stones and brick pattern. They can be assembled in various ways to obtain “L-shaped, shallow relief or full flat” building configurations. I felt the foundation stones did not have enough relief and substituted stone-patterned plastic sheets for the foundation. The kit included wood strips to represent concrete building corners and cornices. I instead applied pieces at the corners to represent cut-stone quoins and built out the cornices and painted them dark green to look like wood. Two of the eight wall sections had minimal areas of bricks and were mostly smooth to give the appearance of having been repaired with concrete. I think they were finished this way to reduce the amount of laser cutting of bricks on these wall sections. The look of these panels was unsatisfactory to me but I had to use them for the rear wall of the building. I did like the laser-cut pieces for the window sashes, lintels and sills. Also supplied in the kit are a roof walkout, roof vent, chimney parts and other detail parts. It took me 77 hours to build the model.
MELGAR
