06-26-2010, 10:36 PM
Gary the discussion of the feasibility of modeling an industry in the front of the bench work reminded me of some buildings on modules built by the Fullerton Railway Plaza Association and often set up in the Orange County Module Railroaders layouts at shows. They have a set of modules that depict much of the industry in downtown Fullerton around the Santa Fe and UP train stations in Fullerton, Ca in 1951. The area directly in front of the mainline was citrus packing houses in 1951. They modeled a bunch of partial warehouses with the inside open like a cut away just behind the protective plastic so that a viewer can lean down and look through the packing houses to the train passing on the tracks just behind the packing houses. In the case of one packing house, someone found an old photograph of the inside of the packing house complete with people packing oranges. They made a copy of the photograph scaled to ho scale and glued it to the back of the front wall of the next to the mainline tracks. It is really quite effective, and very well done. The module set has museum quality models of both the Santa Fe station and the Union Pacific Station in addition to all of the industries from the area in the era that they are modeling that would fit in the space. They have since done a third module that doesn't need to be connected to the other two that features the old Fullerton Pacific Electric Station in Fullerton an a lumber yard that used to be located adjacent to the PE Station.