Back nearly a year ago I posted about how I had been working on structures. One model featured in that article is a gas station intended for the 1960s era, kitbashed from two venerable Plasticville models.

By nature a gas station is a signature structure, it sets the feel for the era of the scene. As I’ve divided my roster to run it in three eras — 1940, 60, and 80 — I needed actually two of them. Also, both really needed to be reasonably accurately scaled for OO, in this location a HO gas station would look very small. Then I had to also figure out signage.

The 1940 station

I puzzled about options and finally figured out if I did a heavy kitbash of two Plasticville structures I had on hand that I could make a reasonable prewar Conoco station. The source materials are the Plasticville Cape Cod House (which is underscale for HO) and the Police Station, using also extra parts left over from the gas station kitbash. With inspiration from photos found on the Internet.

The office (“house”) has new, larger windows and a OO door. Signs are a combination of elements of Microscale sets and also Conoco tank car decals I had on hand. The era of models I want to run with this scenery setup is pre WWII, right in the classic era of American OO models.

The post for both signs is hollow and fits onto a finishing nail, facilitating a quick change of scenery when I decide to change eras.

The 1960 (and 80) station

As I turned initially to completing this model the biggest challenge was decorate it as what? I puzzled and puzzled. Eventually bought the HO scale Shell and Sinclair station sets from Microscale, and puzzled more. I finally came to a decision that even though the stripes fit the building somewhat awkwardly, the best choice was Sinclair. Which also required some additional repainting of doors and elimination of red stripes on the building.

With the decals on I’m pretty happy how it turned out. Now that both models are essentially complete (but I will add interior details) I can turn to working out the underlying pad so that it works well for both models.