Interior Details for 1940s Fruit Market, Pharmacy, Salon & Detective Agency in HO Scale 

Thanks! For me, identifying small details that I can model (within reason), is half the fun.

Thank you!

Thank you! For me, interior details like this are half the fun of model railroading.

@@TheSmokyCity Agree completely without interiors it's just an empty shell a ghost town

Thank you! I think it's my favorite one so far.

I'm not sure where you're seeing glossiness. It's all painted with flat acrylic paint, and the exterior is weathered with a flat coat, India ink and alcohol wash, and Pan Pastels. I guess one downside of using graphics printed on a laser printer for the floors and walls is that at certain angles, you can sometimes see a glare from the interior lights. Maybe an inkjet printer wouldn't have that issue since the ink soaks into the paper, whereas toner sits on top of the paper.

Thank you! I live in Seattle, but spent my first 27 years in Pittsburgh, which influenced my location selection. I've always really liked the look of transition era layouts, so that was a given. My top picks for railroads were what I was accustomed to seeing in model form growing up in the northeast, which was a lot of NYC, PRR & B&O. I really like the look of the B&O heavyweight passenger trains in the blue and gray scheme, and once I decided I wanted to model B&O passenger trains through Pittsburgh in the transition era, I learned that they traveled over the P&LE via trackage rights. That meant I had to model the P&LE, which used equipment lettered for NYC. The PRR also ran parallel to P&LE in sections, so this felt like an opportunity to include all three of my favorite roads in one layout. When I was in college, I worked at a toy store in Station Square, the former P&LE freight house. So, that was an additional personal connection to the place. The time period had to be at least 1948, because that's when Pittsburgh got its first PCC streetcars, and, to me, you can't accurately depict late 40s Pittsburgh scenes without streetcars. When Rapido Trains announced in 2020 that they were making Alco PA-1s decorated for NYC/P&LE, that nailed down the year, since those rolled off the assembly line in April 1949, and I needed them to model the interesting joint service of the B&O's Washingtonian and the P&LE's Steel King. An added bonus of choosing 1949 is that I wouldn't have to model (part of) the Wabash Bridge, which had crossed above the P&LE near the terminal until the fall of 1948. Other factors that influenced my selection of Pittsburgh in the 1940s include my love for jazz, swing and big band music of the 1940s, the fact that my dad, uncles and grandfather worked in steel mills on the P&LE, and the fact that my grandparents married and started their families in Pittsburgh in the 40s.

www.interactionhobbies.com/HO-Scale-Kit-Tobacco-Shop-Interior-Detailing-Kit_p_63.html

@@TheSmokyCity thank you sir