It's interesting, when I first located the place for the urban area on the layout I had in mind some scene with a number of 30s style buildings, a gas station and a car-wash. But, I guess it never grabbed my imagination enough to see through its construction. Later I started kitbashing these retro-future buildings and, well, they seemed more interesting to build a city around, albeit one that never existed and never could or will exist. Is it sci-fi, retro, fantasy, or just plain wrong for a model railroad that isn't a model railroad - can't say that I know, but it seems interesting and I'm curious to see where it goes.
The Square is built on a piece of 1/4-inch acrylic cut to fit the opening defined by the roads and track roadbed. I used acrylic because of its dimensional stability. The railroad is in the basement and it's subject to variations in humidity, so the acrylic provides a solid base that will resist those fluctuations. The part of the train-table where the base will be placed had some circular holes drilled in it so the sheet can easily be removed pushing up through the holes. I may add some smaller ones later to accommodate lighting. 
Using this way to build the town it is possible to have several towns that could fit in the same place as long as they had the same shape base. This makes for lots of photo possibilities for new ideas. 
I've started with the Deroalow, Amtronic ranch and Art Deco Chapters as the cornerstones of the Square. They're attached with small drops of superglue to hold their bases to the acrylic. I figured if the drops were small enough, they'd be securely held in place, but could be sliced off at some later time if I wanted to change things up. Well, it turns out I made a mistake in the placement of the Deoralow and had to test my theory and slice it off. It wasn't too hard, but I did damage one corner of its base in the process - nothing that can't be cleaned up when I do some more scenicing.
The remaining big empty space is going to be filled with a station for picking up passengers.
This is the second HO scale project utilizing the leftover parts from the L'il Aqua build. The first was the L'il Overlook project that used the cab of the AMT / Ertl L'il Gasser kit. This one uses portions of the passenger compartment from the AMT Amtronic kit as the basis of a retro-futuristic ranch house.
The build is actually pretty simple. The upper half of the Amtronic passenger compartment was assembled more-or-less as per the kit instructions, but was modified slightly at one end to accommodate a main entry door (note that it doesn't have an alternative entrance, so it's probably a fire hazard!).
The front door was an item included in a Tichy Train Group variety pack of HO scale windows and doors I bought last year. The porch lights are also items from Tichy Train.
I should note that the parts in the Amtronic kit don't go together well. I had problems with fit on the L'il Aqua project - which made use of the Amtronic cab - and also had problems with the passenger compartment in this project.
The windows especially had to be finessed, and I'm still not too happy with the end result. The black seals banding the windows were an attempt to hide some rather hideous gaps. The 'seals' are just strips of 0.012 inch styrene.
As well, the windows were painted light grey on their inner surfaces to prevent seeing inside the building.
It turns out that the bottom edge of the Amtronic passenger compartment is slightly curved. I sanded it a bit to flatten it, but only a little because sanding it completely flat would have not allowed enough overall height to install the door and the entry-way modification. Scenic bushes and grass was used to hide the remaining gap once the building was placed on the base.
The retro-future wouldn't be complete without an old-school satellite dish, so one I had in the scrap box was added to the roof. The basketball hoop is scratchbuilt from some plastic tubing, sheet styrene and balsa. The basketball is a plastic bearing painted orange.
The trees are from JTT Scenery Products and I really like the fine canopy and branch structure. The trunks are ok, but one can see that they are made from twisted wire - it's not completely unpleasing, but a superdetailer would probably clean them up a bit, I just painted them with a loose wash of grey, flat black and brown to tone down their colour.
What's going on in the driveway? I'm not too sure, but it might have something to do with leaving unattended bikes where they might accidently get run-over!
John Varley’s 2003 sci-fi novel Red Thunder is a fun read. I picked it up because I had heard that it was written in classic Robert Heinlein style, and being a Heinlein fan, I wanted to see if it was true. It was.
In the story the main characters build a spaceship out of used railroad tank cars. They can get away with using such low-tech components because one of them has discovered a propulsion source so powerful that the mass of the vehicle it propels is irrelevant! All that matters is that the structure is strong and robust enough to handle the rigours of pressurization and flight, so seven cylindrical railroad tank cars - a central one surrounded by six others - fills the bill.
My guess is that it’s probably rare that a sci-fi novel features a spaceship built from used railroad gear, but this one goes even further and in Chapter 21 Mr. Varley describes an HO-scale model of the ship that is used by the team for PR purposes. Mr. Varley even discusses some of the components used to build it: the landing legs came from an old model of an Apollo Lunar Excursion Module (my guess would be the Airfix 1/72 scale LM), springs from an R/C Hummer model, and spherical fuel tanks for the magic fuel were made from Christmas tree ornaments.
So, maybe if I eventually get my act together and build the launch pad micro-layout, I’ll have to consider adding a model of the Red Thunder.
