HOW TO… BUILD A SHOP

It’s rare that railway stations are built in the middle of nowhere. So, when making our model layouts, we’ll often need scenery outside the railway fence, and usually, that will mean a town of some sort.

One of the easiest ways of adding individual buildings to a layout is to build a kit. We’ve had the choice of pre-printed card models for years. Several well-known manufacturers produced excellent kits, but they tended to be fairly fixed in what could be done with them – they weren’t easy to change significantly and the same row of shops could be seen on many layouts. Later, plastic injection moulded kits gave us more interesting structures, but these were often based on specific prototypes and weren’t always suitable for the era or region being modelled.

More recently, there have been many