Finishing a Tomix corner building

This Tomix corner building is one of a pair that I modified about 14 years ago to form the entry of the Musashi-Koyama Palm shopping arcade.  They along with the rest of the arcade structures have been sitting on the module all this time with a primer gray color while I worked on other areas of the modules.  The photo below shows how it looks with the other structures removed.  The modifications to this structure had been that part of it on the left side had been removed to make it fit in the space available and the windows had been covered with a styrene siding.

Up until the late 2000's, the actual location that this model is based on had been a yakitori chicken place.  That's long gone now but I wanted it in my representation of the area as it was in the 1990's.  I recalled noticing what seemed to be a take out counter and my wife remembers it having both take out or eat in options.  So leaving out the clear plastic front door insert, I made a counter and back wall attached to the base.

And here it is with the building re-installed to see that everything still fits OK.  I plan to add lighting over the counter area and some detail as well.  The opening to the right of the counter will be the entrance to the restaurant.

To light the area of the take out counter I used 2 surface mount LED's glued to a piece of clear window material left over from a kit and dulled with sandpaper to defuse the light.  The LED's were connected to a leftover board from an Atlas locomotive to use it's current limiting resistor. Scraps of decoder wire were used to connect the LED's to the board then 22 gauge wire was soldered to the inputs of the board to connect it to the 12 volt DC buss under the module.

A sign was created for this business and attached to a sign board that was in my stash of parts.  The sign board and exterior trim was painted yellow and the visible interior walls were painted a darker yellow.  Some menu board images from the internet were shrunken down to side and pasted to the wall behind the counter.  In these last two photos it will be noticed that tile flooring has been added.  How I did this will be covered in a future post.

To finish this building the visible exterior walls were painted white and the roof received some 3D printed details.  Then the roof received some black weathering wash which really brings out the detail on the items on the roof.

Finishing a Green Max office building

On the small extension module I added to one end of the Musashi-Koyama modules to make the set 2 meters long, I have a kit bashed Green Max building from set 46-7 that I never finished.  Coming off the completion of the Kato building, I feel now is the time to tackle this building.

The building is separate from the styrene base and both are held in place on the module with a single 4-40 screw.  The building first got 2 coats of a pale blue color.  It was my first time using Vallejo paint in my air brush and it worked out well after thinning the paint a bit with distilled water.  I'll be using more Vallejo paints in the future.

One of the ground floor entry pieces was installed on the first floor after the trims and door handle were painted with a silver Sharpie pen.  The roof, base, elevator tower door, and awning were all hand painted, and one of the stickers from the set was installed above the ground floor making that floor a bank.  The tenants of the building will be in the financial services industries except for the 2nd floor which will be restaurant.  I painted the window frames on the 2nd floor gold. 

The Green Max building kits don't come with window glazing but include sheets of clear plastic that can be cut and glued to the interior walls.  I used canopy glue to do this.  This particular building was modified to fit in the space and the back wall was left off as it would not be seen once the building is on the module.  This made it easy to access the inside of the building.

The side of the elevator tower got some paper signs that I made on the computer.  The second floor restaurant is a izakaya serving tako which in English is grilled octopus.  The billboard is an advertisement for some sort of fruit yogurt drink.   

Two of the vertical signs from the kit were modified and placed on the corner of the building, a stock broker on the 5th floor and an insurance office on the 3rd.  A real estate office occupies the 4th floor and uses the small sign board.  All of there signs are stickers from the kit.

Finishing the grade crossing scene

In a previous post, I had described the modification and installation of a set of TomyTec grade crossing signals and gates.  In this post I want to describe the finishing of the scene as a whole.  As a starting point, here again is the overhead photo of the scene as it has been for the past couple of years.  There is a removable catenary wire structure that has been removed while I do this work.

And here is the same scene after I had finished with the crossing gates.  I added yellow border stripes to the pedestrian crossing and removed the white stripe across the road on the side closest to the front edge of the module as it was not in the correct spot in relation to the gate.  As I had some gray paint out to paint the border around that removable gate, I also painted the sidewalks closest to the front edge and the support structures on all of the signals. 

And here is the finished scene.  The sidewalk and all of the gray parts on the signals have been weathered to better represent concrete.  The ballast and turf scenery has been touched up around the closest crossing gate and other spots as needed.  A new white stripe near the closest gate has been added, and several figures have been placed in the scene.  

One of the figures is this 3 wheeled delivery vehicle from a TomyTec set which are so common in Tokyo.  This and the other figures were attached with canopy glue.  I like to not glue down most vehicles so I can arrange them when setting up the modules.  

Installing TomyTec crossing gates

On the small extension module that I built to make the Musashi-Koyama module set a full 2 meters long there was this grade crossing that had never been fully finished.

While shopping during our recent trip to Japan I saw this Tomytec set and thought it would be just the thing for this unfinished grade crossing as it had the signals for a separate pedestrian crossing just like in the scene on my module.

This is all the parts to the set after I had installed the crossing arms.  The pavement parts I won't be needing for this project so they will be put away for some future use.  The gate arms are separate pieces and in this photo I have already installed them.  They can be set in either an up or down position. 

These crossing gates are intended to be installed below the level of the cork roadbed and it was necessary to make some modification to have the grossing gate arm at a more realistic level when down.  I ran into the same issue with the Green Max gates on the 1st crossing and covered that in THIS POST.  For the gate on one side of the street I cut down the height of the base as shown here so it could be glued down to the existing scenery.

On the other side of the street things are a bit more complicated.  The gate will actually be on another module as the edge of the street is where the seam is between the modules.  For this gate I cut an opening in the cork that the base could fit into and attached a small magnet to the inside of the base with E6000 adhesive.  

And here are all of the gates and signals installed on the module.  On the 3 that are not held by a magnet I used E6000 adhesive to attach them to the existing base.   Of course there is more I need to do to finish this scene and I will cover that in a future post.

Finishing a Kato office building

I know, long time no post.  I've been keeping busy with my American theme home layout but with another 5 day long exhibit of the AsiaNrail layout coming up at Hiller Aviation Museum in April I wanted to finish a few more things on the modules.

This Kato office building was one of the first Japanese buildings I bought back around 2009 but never finished.  A couple of years ago I did get around to painting it to get rid of the plastic look.  Now I want to get rid of the vacant look.

The Kato part number is 23-435 and they are still available.  These buildings are particularly well designed, have interior walls, and can be easily made taller or shorter 2 floors at a time.  I'm leaving this one at it's stock 6 floor height.

I decided that I wanted to light and detail the lowest 2 floors.  The ground floor was going to be a convenience store and the base already had detail for a restaurant so I cut that off with a hack saw. 

The base got a new floor and wall arrangement to resemble a small convenience store.  Shelves and counter were made from scraps of styrene and printouts of on line photos pasted to the shelves. 

The 2nd floor was going to be a pizza restaurant and the interior for that was built on the existing 2nd floor insert that is part of the kit.  Most of the fixtures were scratch built and the chairs came from a Pieser set. 

The upper floors windows got blinds printed out on paper, taped to the inside of the windows and set at various heights.  The upper floors businesses include a music school,  an optometrists,  a language school, and a dental clinic.  The signs were created using Google translate, then copying the Japanese text into Microsoft Visio where it can be edited for size and color.  Background color and any graphics are also added then printed out on plain paper.  Glossy package tape was used to give the signs some shine then they were pasted on styrene strip.

Here is a closeup of the floors with interior detail.  Two surface mount LEDs were used on each floor.  The restaurant has warm spectrum LEDs and the convenience store has white LEDs.

Here is the completed building back on the module.  I added that billboard sign on the side of the building from a image I found on the internet.  The type of glue featured in the ad is the same as what I used to paste some of the paper parts of this project.

The vertical signs on the front of the building were made the same way as the signs that are above each window then pasted to each side of a strip of styrene.

Report from the recent layout exhibit

We had our AsiaNrail layout setup from Wednesday, April 12th to Sunday, April 16th as part of the Trains and Planes exhibit at the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, CA.   With an overall size of 20ft x 10ft, this was one of the largest layouts we have done.  The layout consisted of an oval loop and a pair of long branch lines that connected to each other and to the loop through Paul's 4 way juncton module.  This was the first time I have had all my modules in the same layout at one time. 

 

I got to run my new Micro-Ace JR Kyushu 185 Yufu train that I had purchased last month while in Tokyo.  There are 4 cars to this set but we mostly ran it on the branches so we ran it in a 3 car formation.  It is shown here on Paul's Shifen Taiwan module set which was at the end of one of the branches. 

The opposite of end of the long double branch line was my Hot Springs module.  Shown here with my JR113 in Nagano colors and Hakone Tozan Railway trains sitting at the station.  I had built a new set of adjustable height legs for this module so it could be set up at the 51 inch AsiaNrail height.  The legs can also be set for Ntrak height for use in an Ntrak layout.  Another modification made to use it in this layout was to replace the sky board with a profile board so it could be viewed from both sides.

Several other modules made up this branch line and one of them was my 45 degree curved shoreline module, shown here as Paul's Hisatsu Orange Railway Type HSOR-100 passing through.

My 45 degree Highway Overpass module made it's second outing with this layout.  Shown here with Paul's Sanriku Railway Train crossing the bridge. 

It was great to have a layout at a show again after 3-1/2 years of not having any opportunities to do so.  This show also had a few other layouts in several scales.   This museum has this event during Easter week along with several other events so it was quite well attended.  It was just Paul and myself running the layout this time so we were on our feet most of the time.  I was mostly running the branch line which is why I have more photos of that part of the layout.

Shopping in Japan - Nakano Broadway

While in Tokyo in March I visited a shop recommended by one of my wife's cousins that I had not been to before.  As the title of this post suggest, it is in Nakano just a few blocks north of the station on the JR Chuo line.

The building is several floors of many shops featuring all kinds of things.  The floors are connected by escalators and I had the feeling that this building may have at one time been a large department store.  The shop I was interested in was identified by it's railway crossing colors on the front.

I had been looking for the Kato HB-E300 Buna set but it was out of stock here as it had been in all the other shops I checked on this trip.  But, I did find something that I had been looking for since my wife and I rode this train in 2017.  With the great exchange rate right now I am really happy with this purchase.  Lots of the items in this shop are resale but the operator of the shop was very good about letting me inspect the models carefully and test everything on the test track in the shop.  This will be running on the AsiaNrail layout setup next week.