Combining different brands of structures?

I'm a nephrologist by trade......but, I've done some counseling along the way and I think this marriage can be saved......

Plasticville structures, when detailed, painted and placed with care can be welcome additions to a scale-detailed layout. Here is the Plasticville Cathedral placed on one of our corner modules by modular group member Walt. These are test shots that I submitted to Allan prior to our article in run 320....

Here is a picture, that I just took. I weathered the cathedral and changed out the "stained glass". I hope to hide it in a "concrete canyon" of my city scene.....not knowing at this time, how much of the structure will show besides the steeple.

Hope this helps a bit,

Peter

I find many of the manufacturers build to different scales so it isn't just Plasticville.
I agree with Peter - if you put in alot of detail painting some of those structures can look realistic.  You'll have to be careful with putting in figures and vehicles to match the scale.  If you buy unpainted figures you can find them at 1:48 and 1:50, so maybe go with the smaller figures for the Plasticville.

Great dilemma to be in Chessiechick

I'm cheating by having a true scale sized layout and a separate "anything goes" layout. If I had to do it all in one, I would have a Plasticville-only area where I could honor the history and memories, without the odd size differences interfering with your true scale efforts everywhere else. Perhaps a "movie lot" on your layout where all the Plasticville structures live?

Put the Plasticville stuff in the back of the layout after painting them with realistic colors and some weathering. Put your scale and kitbashed stuff up front. That should be a good compromise for a happy marriage.

I think you'd kinda have to look at each Plasticville building separately - some would work better as full 1:48 scale buildings than others. A big thing is the doors, since doors tend to be a standard size. Older brick and stone churches (like the beautiful one in Peter's post) tend in real life to have greatly oversized doors, so works to my eye very well. (Although they call it a "cathedral" it looks to me a like a small old chapel.)

The apartment building kits can be stacked together to make as tall a building as you want.

@wjstix posted:

The apartment building kits can be stacked together to make as tall a building as you want.

In addition......the roof access on the Plasticville Apartment Building can be used as roof access on other structures.......when you see me "dumpster diving" at train shows, that's one of the things I'm hoping to find.....

Peter

My advice is going to be completely different from much of the above.  The charm of Plasticville is that it harkens back to a time when the emphasis in toy trains was on toy.  While you can kitbash them, paint them and carefully scenic them so they better fit with realistic scenery, doing so strips away their Plasticville quality.  Rather than try to hide what they are, embrace it.  Find a discrete out of the way location on your layout and declare it your Plasticville.  You can rotate structures so you don't have to have all of them out at once.  You can also populate that area with your more cheesy figures and more toy like autos. Properly designed it might be possible to quickly change that area into a used car lot, a junk yard or lumber yard for when you wanted to operate with purely realistic scenery.

I personally LOVE Plasticville and have a lot of fond memories of it from my own childhood layouts.  That being said, IMO the structures are too small to look good with the larger scale-sized trains, especially modern rolling stock like auto racks, double stacks, etc.  As someone else said, place it towards the back of the layout to achieve a kind of forced perspective.  I would be in favor of repainting it with muted colors to further that illusion.  Another trick you can do, is to mount a building on a "foundation" of 1/4" or 3/8" wood or foam, so that it sits a little higher.

I bought nothing but "scale" rolling stock for about 10 years.  More recently I've come to realize that 3-rail O, and even 2-rail O scale ("Ow5") are rife with compromises.  If you and Mr. Chessichick are spending quality time together and getting enjoyment out of the hobby, that's all that matters!!