# North Pole Buildings for Polar Express Layout



## seabilliau

Greetings,
This is a post for how I contracting the buildings in my Lionel Polar Express layout, http://www.modeltrainforum.com/showthread.php?t=10219


Here is the finished product. The images following show the progress of making them.









I originally wanted to use actual buildings but had a hard time finding anything that suited my needs. I then was inspired by peoples use of fronts instead of whole buildings. So, I went looking for large brick buildings on the internet and found this site: 

http://www.cgtextures.com/

Great site for any type of texture or building/structure.

Anyway, I found some buildings, registered, downloaded and then had them ringed on white card stock at the local copy shop. 











Next, I then took my Exacto knife and cut out the image to size I wanted it.











Once I had cut out all the images the next step was to cut out foam board. I had seen at the Amhurst Train Show how a guy was selling waterproof backboard to use in a similar manner. I asked what the board was and he said it was just waterproof foam board. Well, I didn't need waterproof foam board so I use went to the store and bought regular foam board.











Once I had cut out the foam board I then glued the images to the foam board with a hot glue gun. Below is an image of the pieces laid next to each other.











LIGHTS!!!!!

The next step was to glue the foam board together and then put the LED strips on the foam board. Here is what I bought off of Amazon for $50. 15 feet of soft white LED strip, a power transformer, and a dimmer switch. 










Glueing the strip to the foam board was really easy. I used a hot glue gun. The LED strips bend really easy, take the glue well, and have glue already on the back of the strip. I found that the strips are pretty pliable and worked very well when even bent pretty far, but be careful, they only bend so far.




















Once its all put together... You get this










I hope you have enjoyed reading this and that you may get an idea yourself from this post.

Cheers

Sea B


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## tjcruiser

Sea B,

I like it! Thanks for posting the details. I'm always amazed how some simple cardstock building images can easily add to a scene. The shapes are simple, but the photo-detail of the cornices, windows, roofing, etc. is quite nice.

Cheers,

TJ


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## seabilliau

cgtextures.com has some amazing stuff. Even if you don't use anything from their site, they have so many pictures to look at sorted by subject that you can get a great proto idea for something else you might be working on. 

They have dozens of pictures of just different types of cement, for example. Or brickwalls.


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