Dept. 56 Vs. Tinplate (Metal) Buildings

I love Cody Foster's cardboard & mica whimsical fantasy houses.  The really large ones are wonderful for Standard Gauge.

How about a seasonal change? Swap out the tinplate buildings for Snow Village sometime in the fall, then switch back to tinplate whenever you get tired of the winter. And maybe when you put the tinplate back, try a new arrangement, or a different assortment of buildings if you have extras that you aren't displaying now. 

Southwest has the right solution.  That's what I would do.

So many layouts are set in Perpetual Mid-Summer.  Why not Perpetual Christmas Week?

Too me Snow Village is like Christmas decorations. They look great at Christmas but get old during January.

Dept. 56 is great. Tinplate bldgs are great too. I do understand the logic behind not mixing the two. With the selection of tinplate bldgs not changing, I've thought about buying a few MTH houses and repainting them in tinplate colors.

Is your layout a toy or model layout. If a model layout than you have a specific period you model and your question is answered. If a toy layout, think back to what you did as a kid. Did you care if the buildings all matched, I never did. If I liked it on it went. I had little buildings next to large buildings. Cars parked in front of houses that their drivers could never get into. Nobody cared! They were toys and ment to be fun. Sometimes as we get older we get caught up in that adult thing and forget to have fun. Tinplate more than any other side of the hobby has the potential to take us back to our childhood and have fun. Forget what anybody else thinks, it's your layout.

Al

Whoops!  When I saw the heading I thought this was going to be about metal

(tinplate) buildings such as by Skyline and Marx.  I've admired the Skyline

metal buildings, especailly the blue roofed station, but they are shelf sitters here.

I was gonna comment about not thinking there were enough actual metal buildings

to populate an O gauge layout.

The Skyline and Marx creations are railroad structures, not gas stations, houses, and stores (well, Marx made gas station play sets, but with BIG footprints, but the Marx station that can be found with a crank soundmaker on its roof has a BIG footprint, too,  and Marx made some small, very basic 1930's structures all made with same dies, and, of course, their very large playsets .  Or did somebody manufacture a town of metal, approximately O gauge,  structures?

I just visualized a layout with all these railroad structures, the larger stations, but

serving towns made up of Marx western town playset buildings (not cheap!).  There

are enough different playset towns and enough metal stations to furnish a basement

Standard guage?  or maybe, larger, LGB layout. I will bet that has been done.  (my brother and I used his Marx playsets on our Marx layout as kids...in scale?  Naw, but we didn't care.)

H&H made some nice tin Twinkle Town Houses in 5 color combinations. They show up on e-bay regularly, but are almost always poorly listed. Also, Atlas made at least 4 color combinations of painted tin houses. These are tougher to find. Between them, you can set up a complete small tin neighborhood.

Steve

Thanks, Mr. Eastman:  I have seen those Twinkletown houses for years in shows,

but didn't know what they were or who made them..I had just guessed Skyline....apparently their eBay sellers don't either...

Is that last green trimmed house shown in your posting one of the rare Atlas houses,

as it looks different from the others?

here's an alternate to the metal houses...

click here for free plans, instruction and graphics...

http://www.bigindoortrains.com...ape_cod/cape_cod.htm

here's the finished product...

you'll find other free "faux-litho" projects here...

http://littleglitterhouses.com..._how_to.htm#tinplate

my very best regards...howard

Speaking of Tin Buildings, has anyone seenany of the tin buidlings like the ones that came out with cookies in them the last couple of years? Last year they came out at Big Lots and the year before at Walmart. I'm hoping that another series is coming and am keeping an eye peeled for them. They are great tin buildings.

George

My personal preference is not to combine Dept. 56 and tin buildings, just by reason of their very different "look and feel". We have a number of porcelain buildings, but we keep them on shelves, and have them wired. They look cool when all are lit.

I do have different areas of the layout, however; one area has tin litho buildings, one has Plasticville and Marx/K-Line, and one has scale buildings. If I had more room, I would have a fourth area, but I don't, and the result is that the Dept. 56 stuff is on the shelves.

I have both sets...the complete sets from WalMart and the sets from Big Lots.  Both are very nice, and the price was certainly right.  I buy two sets of each because you can turn them around, front-to-back, and get double the number of different buildings for the same price.  I, too, will be on the lookout for them again this year.