It’s not a plane, or a ship, or …

I have a lot of modeling vices that seem to have no bounds on time and money, such as building planes, ships, armor, and the occasional car. In addition to this, my dad got me interested in model trains many years ago. Now that I am retired, I actually have time to work on these many things. So, the editors, designers, etc at Model Railroader Magazine occasionally have "challenges" where they all take their own diverse builds on various model railroad things. They also invite readers & viewers to participate. their first challenge was to build a model railroad module to the same size and configuration, and my participation in this first challenge got me interested in building an N Scale layout. (I am already about 50% done on an HO layout). Their current challenge is to all take the same kit for an HO building, and then kitbash it into some other kind of building. There were some restrictions, such as a $50 limit for anything you wanted to add to the project. Plastic pieces, such as Evergreen sheets & strips, didn't count in the total.

So I took the State Line Farm Supply kit and kitbashed it into an old Texaco gas station. I used to see these all the time when I was growing up in the 1950s in West Texas. Most of them had survived from the 1930s and then changed with the times. I cut some templates made by photocopying the building sides, and then cutting them into the pieces I planned to use and then taped everything together to see if it would work. The interior is completely scratchbuilt, with shelves and tires from internet photographs. The metal roof was made by sandwiching kitchen foil between two pieces of Evergreen .060 metal roof sheets. The front area with the pumps was created from foam core and plastic. The main roof is masking tape over the plastic roof which was then painted & weathered. Decals were courtesy of images downloaded from the internet which were then printed on decal paper using a laser printer. I had heard that decals made with a laser printer don't need a clear coat to seal them. The decals received no clear coat & stood up well to Microsol & Microset, as well as several coats of clear flat paint. Weathering was from Vallejo. The town of El Dorado (the name on the station) is the name I gave to the fictional town on my HO layout. The name comes from one of my favorite poems, El Dorado by Edgar Allen Poe. It was a fun project and really took me back to my youth.

I know this isn't the usual plane, ship, or armor that you might usually see on iModeler, but all of the techniques used are certainly applicable to any other type of model. In fact, I learned how to do most of these things by building planes, and boat, and armor, and...

9 additional images. Click to enlarge.