# "1922 Street Traffic" Project



## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

Having done some serious work on the layout 'til I am rather tired of that, and then completed a lot of custom-painted tank cars, I've decided on a change of pace and will work on diecast cars for the layout for a while. 

My layout is normally set up as the mid 1950s, with cars of 1935 - 1955 vintage parked on the streets, street lights and billboards of the style back in the '50s, etc. In the past I had fun changing out the cars, billboards and all, and voom! it was the late sixties. Now I'm going back to 1922 - not sure why I picked that year, but . . . . I think it would be fun to set up the look of th e flapper era and run locos, etc., from that time period for a while.

Anyway, I've been buying up cars from the 1910 - 1922 era since a swap meet in late May, looking for bargains. I've accumulated the two dozen shown here, and two upstairs with new paint drying after being repainted. Some cost only $4, but the average was probably just about $9 each. I have another four coming in the mail. Many are bargains because they are difficult-to-sell logos (I have three Ace hardware model T trucks) and.or are cheap (no windshield glass), but I can paint and upgrade details and it will be fun. I will post results as I complete and get more. 

I started buying 1:43 cars and 1:50 trucks just to populate my layout, but I must admit they have a charm of their own.


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## cole226 (Feb 8, 2013)

*1920's*

now you'll have to look for bugsy, capone, and Elliot Ness and that bunch!

AND, I like your black string of tankers.:thumbsup: could always throw one of GRJ's super chuffers in one for a little excitement OIL FIRE


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

You'll have to get a whole new crop of villains for the layout now!


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## bill937ca (Jul 18, 2014)

Prohibition! So you can have speakeasies, blind pigs and clandestine breweries, but no real bars or alcohol or beer advertising.


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## bill937ca (Jul 18, 2014)

Don't forget Lledo Days Gone vehicles. I hear often these are 1/64, but here is a comparison to a 1/43 Ertl 1930 Chevy truck. The Lledo prototype may be an Austin Seven van. Although these are early 30s vehicles Lledo does offer some 1900 to early 1920s vehicles as well. Many are under $10.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

Interesting. I'll look at Lledo - had not done so up to now.


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## Wood (Jun 9, 2015)

A little later then you want, but I could not resist showing you my favorite vehicles on my layout parked outside the Menard's Lionel Store in downtown Dorchester. 1930 Chevrolets by ERTL


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

Wonderful vehicles, Wood. I think "Lionel" logo trucks and cars are great. I have their blimp coin-bank in a box somewhere, and one or two of the trucks too. The two you have in the photos are great. I like these a lot. My experience is that they are hard to find at bargain prices, though, if painted in Lionel colors, etc. 

Eventually, I want to get a complete set of cars - each enough to fill up the layout, for the mid '20s, '30s, '40s, and '50s, and the very late '60s/1970 (height of the muscle-car era). I have the '50s and '60s covered well, and nearly enough for the 40's and '30s.

I've made no special effort to collect cars for the 1930s time period, as the two you highlight are from, yet I have more of them than from the '20s. I just keep running into them at good prices while shopping for other eras. For example I was shopping for post WWI cars on Amazon earlier this week and found two from that era - but also ordered four 1930s cars, various models, at only $9 each: somebody is dumping a ton of 1:43 models of Russian cars on the market now, through Amazon and several other retailers like American Hobby. they are plastic, not metal, but nice models for the money, and they look just like american cars. The Soviets shameless copied American designs: they would never ask, just get one, take it apart, and set up factories to make more. You can find a dozen 1940 GAZs, Mosvitchs and all that are knock offs of 1930s and '40s Fords, Chevies, trucks, etc, often, as below, for only $9 - shipping is high (and it takes forever) but if you order six or more its the same price it doesn't go up much and its reasonable. 

http://www.amazon.com/GAZ-black-Mod...=UTF8&qid=1436353247&sr=1-3&keywords=1:43+GAZ


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

I'm having a lot of fun with this project. There are a couple of recent completions. These two Ford model T light trucks were both Ace hardware, as shown - a bit garish and toy like. One of them cost a dollar plus $3 shipping, the other $4.91 with free shipping. Disassembled, repainted, touched up, added a windshield (they had enpty windshield frames), etc. They will be parked in front of the hardware store on my layout.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Very cool, and brings back memories. My uncle had an old Model-T when I was a kid, he still drove it as his main car in the late 40's!


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

My grandfather had stories of model T's - he and my grandmother drove one from Arkansas to Colorado after WWI, taking several weeks. I remember someone in his neighborhood driving one as their second car in the mid '50s. They bring back memories for me, too. 

An interesting point to me it that today, a T and an A look and are reated as pretty much the same, OLD, totally antique, worthless for daily transportation But I remember in the early fifties, even as a kid, i picked up on the fact that model A's were still considered serviceable if a bit dated. At least those still in use had elecric starters, glass all around, heaters, and could climb the hills outside of town up to my grandfathers house. By contrast my relatives would talk about hose spidery putt-putt T's as antique - something that really ought not to be on the street any more. 

I have never driven a T. However, I was a referee in a model T disassembly-assembly contest. Teams of three would compete to drive their model T around a short oval course, stop, take it apart enough to pass all of it, except the frame, through a barrel hoop, re-assemble it, start it, and complete a second lap. People can do it in less than a hour, by the way: a big part of winning was knowing what you can leave assembled and wiggle through the hoop. 

I have twelve 1:43 model T's now - 7 trucks and 5 cars out of 14 trucks and 16 cars (counting those on order still). Thus about 40% of my vehcles for 1922 are Fords. I figure this is not far off the proportion of cars on the streets that were Fords back then.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

I can remember him in the driveway cranking his Model-T furiously to get it started, that always brought a smile to my face. 

I think you're right about the percentage of Fords, they were really big in the early 1900's.


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## cole226 (Feb 8, 2013)

*ford*

with the development of the assembly-line, Ford's idea was to put the common man in a car:SELLIT:

probably were a lot more fords than anything else for a while.:sly:


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## Wood (Jun 9, 2015)

*Ford's Tin Lizzie*

Interesting facts taken from "The Best Selling Cars Blog:



> Its success defied reason even by today’s standards. Starting slow (10,660 units in 1909), production took off in 1916 at 501,462 units before literally exploding and passing the million annual units in 1922 at 1,301,067…
> 
> 1923 was the Model T’s best year and is still today the highest annual production figure ever achieved by a single model with 2,011,125 units produced in a single year! That’s more than twice nowadays’ Toyota Corolla figure in a good year… By then Ford was churning out Model T’s at a rate of up to 10,000 cars a day!
> 
> At launch in 1908 it was twice cheaper than any other car, at $850 (equivalent to $20,700 today). In 1913, the price dropped to $550 ($12,200 today), and $260 in 1924 ($2,900 today) because of increasing efficiencies of assembly line technique and volume.


Below you will find production figures. In 1922 Ford made 1,147,028 cars and all others combined made 385,000 cars. So Lee you best buy a few more Fords because Ford carried 66% of all American made cars in that year.

Production Figures for 1921 Production Figures for 1922 Production Figures for 1923
Ford 1,275,618 Ford 1,147,028 Ford 1,831,128
Chevrolet 130,855 Dodge 152,653 Chevrolet	323,182
Buick 82,930 Chevrolet	138,932 Buick 201,572
Dodge 81,000 Buick 123,152 Willys-Overland196,038
Studebaker 65,023 Studebaker	105,005 Durant 172,000
Willys-Overland48,016 Willys-Overland 95,410 Dodge 151,000
Hudson/Essex 27,143 Durant 55,300 Studebaker 146,238
Nash 20,850 Maxwell/Chalmers	44,811 Hudson/Essex 88,914

When I preview this post the chart goes whacking. But, if you look closely you can see the numbers. If you want to see the whole chart go to this link: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Automobile_Production_Figures

Interesting little study...


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## rrbill (Mar 11, 2012)

Henry Ford paid his workers an unheard of sum of $ 5.00 a day, since he wanted them to be able financially to afford to buy the cars they assembled. In addition to being mechanically gifted, he knew a thing or two about marketing his product.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

rrbill said:


> Henry Ford paid his workers an unheard of sum of $ 5.00 a day, since he wanted them to be able financially to afford to buy the cars they assembled. In addition to being mechanically gifted, he knew a thing or two about marketing his product.


The model T is iconic because it sold well, and it sold well because it was a just-good-enough car perfectly marketed and promoted and produced in a way that allowed a very low marginal cost for additional production. Henry Ford was a genius in those areas. In addition to allowing his workers to buy the product they were making, and maybe more important, $5/day got him the cream of the labor force and gave him workers motivated to work hard and pay attention to the details.

Another virtue was the cars simplicity: it was designed to be easy (and cheap) to put together and that made it easy (and cheap) to take apart and repair, or modify into rural farm power generators, irrigation assistance vehciles, and thousands of other home-spun variations. It was, in all ways except its attributes as a car, genius. I doubt the Dodge Brothers and others who thought the way to success was to design and build a really good car, realized why they were falling so far behind until it was far too late to ever catch up.


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## highvoltage (Apr 6, 2014)

Wood said:


> .........In 1922 Ford made 1,147,028 cars and all others combined made 385,000 cars. ....


Hmm, I think your calculator needs to be sharpened a bit:

Production Figures for 1922	
Ford 1,147,028
Dodge 152,653
Chevrolet 138,932
Buick 123,152
Studebaker 105,005
Willy-Overland 95,410
Durant 53,300
Maxwell/Chalmers	44,811
"Sum of Dodge 
through Maxwell"	713,263

But a very interesting table. Thanks for posting it.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

I read up on the model T last night. Then this morning I ordered several more to bash into different versions. I'm impressed with all the different versions that were made - two-door, three door, and four door, wagon and pickup roadster, coupe, speedster (long before the Porsche Speedster, even a town car! And there was the Model T speedster! (Long before Porsche had its Speedster, there was a model T Speedster! I found a model of that and have it coming. but I will have to bash some of the other versions. This morning I used another Ace hardware roadster-truck (see above) to make into a pure little roadster (half done now) and intend to make three of four other models including a coupe, having a total of maybe a dozen T cars on the layout whenever I do "the 1920s." 

I would love to find a couple of models of very final versions of the T coupe and sedan - as sold in the '25-'27 timeframe, with the tapered, rounded hood, etc. They looked far less like a Model T and more like a transition between the model T and the model A. So far I have found nothing like that.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

You may have to make them yourself Lee.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

In researching different versions of model Ts - there were some fitted the tracks instead of wheels for cross country work (I won't be making one of those), I came across this. That's a model T sedan at the left. 

I would have liked to see this. It would have been cool in a Godzilla versus Bambi kind of way.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Did they have Photoshop back then?


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## highvoltage (Apr 6, 2014)

Lee Willis said:


> In researching different versions of model Ts - there were some fitted the tracks instead of wheels for cross country work .......


Like this?


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## Big Ed (Jun 16, 2009)




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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

highvoltage said:


> Like this?
> 
> View attachment 61706


Yes, that is one of them. Several types were made but apparently that was the best one overall. If I had a place on he layout for it I'd make one, but . . . 

The paint on this bashed model T dried overnight and I assembled it this morning. Very pleasing little project: just a basic 1918-1920 Model T roadster. I made it from this ubiquitous ERTL T truck, scratchbuilding a new, better windshield (the model has no glass, only an empoty and far too-thick frame) and the rear truck area, repainting, etc. I goggled model T images and built this using images of a specific T for sale in Hemmings' site. I have more of hese ERTL trucks coming and plan to make a factory pickup, a buddy-seat roadster, and a coupe.


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## Big Ed (Jun 16, 2009)

I used to buy from the Eastwood Automobilia company.
They stopped making diecast a while ago.

These are 1/43 size.
I like them though I think the wheels could have been better.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

I bought several from them a long time ago. I have that same model in different paint. The wheels aren't great, but flat paint tends to make them look better.


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## Big Ed (Jun 16, 2009)

These are a little more in your time frame?

The Anheuser Bush was made by LLEDO Days Gone by collection, made in England.
The Pepsi Cola just says made in China, nothing else.
Both are diecast but look to be closer 1/64 scale? 
I got them just sitting on a shelf in my den.


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## cole226 (Feb 8, 2013)

http://www.modeltrainforum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=61722

lee, black paint takes it from a toy to a realistic looking model.:thumbsup:


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

Yes, plack paint and some attention to detail wih its use make a BIG difference.

BigEd, I have two of that very truck, one a Herseys Chocolate, the other Campbells soup. they are perfect for the era!


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## Big Ed (Jun 16, 2009)

What you need are a few old scooters to add.
Though hard to find an old Harley or Indian would look nice on the layout.
A police scooter better yet, or one of those old 3 wheeled ice cream scooters.:smilie_daumenpos:

This is a 1980 Matchbox Harley. #50.
I think whatever scale it is it is a tad too big. The one picture with the guy in the blue looks OK, but he is a tall O figure. I think 1/64 scale might look better with the O people? As I guess you know, all O people are not created the same.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

You have a good point, big ed, I definitely need some 1920's-era bikes. They will be hard to find but older (1940s 1950s) bikes will do, I suppose. No doubt lots of folks roade motorcycles and motor-bikes in the '20s. I also want to make a few cyclecars - its a phenomena all but forgotten today, and yet there was a time around WWI when Cyclecar Magazine was among the top ten selling periodicals in the US, and cyclecars were everywhere. There would have been a few on the streets of any small town in 1920.

I have a bunch of bikes on my layout now when I do the 1950s or 1960s. Many are actually newer model Harleys from MTH's nice diecast sets, but I've bashed several to make them more '50s like and well, I use what I have . . . 


This vignette of the cliche' motorcycle cop behind the billboard has a cop on a BMW R60 (1956). It s a diecast model from American Hobbies in Poland. The Zundapp to the lower right is an American Excellence diecast model and looks just like one a friend had when I was in high school.








There are a ton of bikes, mostly Harleys but also an Indian or two (the green three wheeler, Woodland Scenics) at the Harley Davidson dealership on my layout. I bashed the three-wheeler from an MTH diecast Harley.








And there are more Harleys and the cheap motel on the edge of town, where the working girls, ah . . . work. 








I have two of this very nice diecast American Excellence model which they clain is a Puch 250. It actually bears little likeness to one and looks more like some pre-and post-war US bikes and very much like a post WWII Royal Enfield 350 with touring fenders. 








finally, I have this vignette where Reed and Malloy are arresting "Big Bike Bob" in the famous stolen copper pipe caper - Bob's downfall was stealing the pikcup that he used to carry home the stolen copper. Dumb Bob, but nice Woodland Scenics bike.


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## Big Ed (Jun 16, 2009)

I thought you would have a few. :thumbsup:

These are HO, how about sitting them somewhere to give that forced perception of something off in the distance?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Motorcycles...041?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item25a896fb91

If you search there are some cheaper than these.


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## Guest (Jul 14, 2015)

Love your street scenes, Lee.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

I now have about 42 cars from 1908 - 1922, nearly the amount I need. Apparently, half of all cars in 1920 were model Ts, so I need to have a lot. So far I have eleven, with another four to build. A majority are bashed ERTL models, and were a lot of fun to research and build. Here they are:








These five are unmodified, all four black models are 1909 Model Ts, and the white one is a 1912 model T Speedster. (Not all Ts were black by the way - Ford only insisted "you can have any color as long as it's black" from 1914 to 1923 or so. Before and after the factory made them in many colors)








The other six as all bashed from the Ace Hardware type ERTL toy-like model truck I posted earlier, using Evergreen plastic, etc.. These two are (left) the standard 1918 roadster model, and (right) a weird one, Fords "Model T Commercial Roadster." It had a small square pickup bed like area in back with a removeable single bucket seat. I don't hink it was really popular - why just _one_ seat?








These two are examples of what many people did: remove the back of a roadster and install a wooden stakebed of their own making.








finally, my favorite is the green model of the factory pickup: as exact a model as I could make of a specific car for sale on Hemmings, and the 1920 Model T coupe, 








I have four more of the ERTL Ace-hardware truck coming, and plan to make the two-door sedan - maybe two, and some other models Not sure what . . . maybe just two more standard T roadsters since they were so common.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Some good lookin' antique motive power! I can't wait to see how the new addition looks with all these sitting around.

Any Streets Model-T cars yet? You need some of them driving.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

I don't think I can fit a 'Streets mechanism in anything much before 1935, and then only in something big - Lincoln or Caddy, probably not a Model, A. It s both size and ride height, a T sits up so far off the ground the pickups and all would be too visible to be realistic - hard to hide them in a tiny vehicle with a foot of ground clearance. I have a mid '20s bus for 'Streets, and the vintage truck (stock, K-line) for 'Streets is close enough to the period to work

I'm going to start putting them out on the layout soon. I don't/won't have quite enough but I hope to get some more soon. I also plan a few horses (I figure in a small rural town even in '22 there would be some . . . ).

Tomorrow's project is to make a dozen plus 1920-ish streetlights, since the goose-neck ones I have on the layout are wrong for that era. I found and printed out a bunch of period billboards (including Coolidge campaign posters) and all that I will use, and I will make other changes - remove the phone booths on the street and vending machines, etc.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

I think you need at least one operating Model-T, you know you can do it!


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## Guest (Jul 19, 2015)

Lee, you have one of the nicest collection of vehicles I have seen in the hobby. They really add to the looks of a layout. The more, the better.


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