How Many Floors High?

Rod,

I believe that Rich Battista explained how he combined MTH buildings as well as individual floors on one or more of his excellent Black Diamond DVDs. I think you just remove the base and upper floor and screw the additional floors in place - the sky's the limit.

Jim

Jim is correct.  All you have to do is remove the bottom floor and top trim piece and then add as many floors as you like.  Here is an example of three of the same building combined together....

Alan

leavingtracks;

That is a mighty impressive building. I count about 15 floors or so.

Do the groups of floors from each separate building just plug together electrically, or do you need to change anything?

Most MTH buildings I have taken apart you have to remove the floor first, then each floor working upwards sequentially.

Is that how you had to put that building together?

Rod

Alan, some of those great towers look like American Skyline buildings. Is that correct? If so, that was one of my favorite toys during the late 50s. I think they were more like S scale, but I may be mistaken. If they weren't Skyline, what was it.

Rod...you have it exactly correct!!  I have had to cut wires on some of the earlier buildings but the later ones have the plugs and are much easier to put back together.

Trainman2001...Good eye my friend!  I have collected over the years about a hundred or so American Skyline sets as I knew I wanted to use them on the layout.  In order to get a credible O scale structure it takes several sets combined together.  Because window spacing in prototypical skyscrapers varies according to ceiling height and architectural style, they go very well with our scale.  I believe they may have been intended to be a smaller scale but you can see from the pictures that building them big allows one to use them on O scale layouts.

Alan

They still come up occasionally on eBay, but they're pretty rare and it would be very hard to amass enough now to build what you've done. Very cool!

The NJ Highrailers have taken MTH structures and given new meaning to the word skyscraper in O gauge.They have used several styles of MTH buildings even with the MTH fire escape detail.And they may be even taller than Alan Arnold's I will have to start counting floors But both Alan and the Highrailers have created a dramatic city scene.

I went sixteen floors once, but it seemed was too high.  I backed off to eight, and eventually removed the building altogether - made eight or nine one to three story buildings out of it instead.

Since you can just insert floors one after the other, I imagine you could go ridiculously high before anything would break from the weight - maybe 40 storiesjust keep adding - probably at some point the first thing that would cause problems would be that you would have too many lights in, say, a forty story building, for the gauge of wire at the bottom, overheating it and/or getting noticeably dim as you reach the top.

For tall buildings, a LED strip is the way to go...taking care of the problem as stated by Lee above.

Alan

Absolutely - you have the building apart because you are installing floors, so just change out the lights while doing it.

The only limit on the numbers of floors is your wallet.......

Some Lionel buildings work the same way...

My whole layout seems to work that way . . .