Balsa Buildings for Model Train Layout Villages

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, my name is Bob Lanning and I’m here to tell you about how we’re making model villages. This little group of buildings here represents one of the larger mining operations in the Cottonwood area, it was actually the Clemenceau at the time, and it was the United Verde Extension line. The original mine was known as the United Verde line and this was called the extension because it was the extension of the same ore body and Rawhide Jimmy Douglas built this about 1915 and it operated till about 1938, it was one of the richest veins of ore in the area, it was forty five percent copper which was fantastic and he was a very rich man and these buildings were called Scratchville. One of our members that is now deceased built these all out of cardboard and very fine basswood or balsa wood and he did this all from photographs of the original smelter area. And it’s kind of compressed, it was much larger in real life but this gives a good idea of what it would look like with all the various little pipes and tubing’s that were used in the mining and smeltering yard which was actually mined about two and a half miles away through a tunnel. Now the fellow that built this worked from photographs and then laid out his materials and bought the wood and none of this is actually commercial parts, it’s all pretty much scratch built out of whatever tubing and materials and rods and dowels that he had, and he just weathered it with various washes of paint to make it look rusty or whatever it would take to make it look old. And there is lights inside the buildings to give it a little more realistic look. "