This is my early April update ( hoping I get enough done between now and the end of the month to have a late April update). With work at home and travel for business, I haven’t had large blocks of time to work on anything major. I have had time to keep working on my main street buildings though.

I have finished off the Bookstore building. When I left off last time I was working on the roof. To get a little more depth to the roof I used masking tape cut down to a scale size to simulate rolled roofing material.

With a coat of flat black paint it turned out pretty well. I didn’t airbrush it, but rather brush painted it. The color is less uniform and looks more like a tarred roof.

I will add fine details after the building is in place.

To finish this block I pulled a couple of old buildings I had previously built out of one of the storage totes. One was City Classics “food Market” and the other was a nondescript brick building. It’s a Kibri kit reboxed and sold by Walther’s. The market needed some touch up to the paint and still needs some kind of interior. I have been looking for suitable photos to print. It has large windows and even with the window banners in place, the empty interior is still obvious.

The brick building on the other hand needed a lot of help. It needed a coat of paint for the brick and stone work details. I added an awning and a photo of a hardware interior. Why a hardware store? I had a Woodland Scenics  dry transfer sheet that had a large hardware store decal that looked good on the blank wall that overlooks the parking lot between it and the bookstore. Thus a hardware store.

Also the buildings were chosen for there height. The buildings taper down from the bookstore to the market. After these commercial building will be a residential neighborhood and I didn’t want a abrupt change visually.

Anyways, here is what it looks like:

Again, fine details will be added to the block once installed on the layout. These will include: street lights, road signs,  parking meters, trash cans, fire hydrants, etc. Also, the streets will be weathered and markings applied once they are all in place.

In the past I have always done all this work on the layout. Doing this on the work bench has been much easier and more enjoyable.

I have one more commercial block to finish and will be starting that soon.

Stay tuned and Happy Railroading…