James River Branch: Second Street Houses

Second Street Houses

In spite of all the changes Naughtright has gone through, one thing remained the same: it was going to have a street of houses. At the time the layout was conceived, there were only a few house kits available; now, as I near the point when I can actually start populating the street, there's a bumper crop of them.

To the right are images of all the kits that I currently own, which includes two each of Mountaineer Precision Products kit #301 and Fannocreek's Lake City House, and three shotgun houses. There are even more kits available, although with Mountaineer Precision Products having bowed out of the Z scale market, two of them are now discontinued.

But... there was only room for three houses. Four, if I did away with the junkyard, but I wasn't going to do that. So, obviously I had some decisions to make. It was really hard to do, because I liked them all, and I'd use them all if only I had a street long enough...

The first thing I did was pull the bases from the kits so I could see their footprints in place along the street. Right away there were some surprises; for instance, the Paw of Bear ranch was way larger than it looked in photos. So, too, were the shotgun houses, strangely enough. Another surprise was how big a Z scale one-car garage was—something I was hoping to include.

Aside from size, two other factors that would affect my choices were setting and location. With respect to setting, one end of Second Street was occupied by a junkyard; newer and higher-class houses were thus inappropriate. Then, the street was located at the back of the layout. It therefore made no sense to include finely-detailed houses, where the detailing might go unappreciated.

Given size, setting and location constraints, the first kits to get voted off the island were Paw of Bear's ranch and MPP's first house as being too big and newish-looking. Then, Animek Model's two cinematically-inspired houses went, being too richly detailed for the back of any layout, in spite of the very strong appeal of Billy's House for my setting.

As I played checkers with the remaining foundations, I kept an eye out for possible modifications; I also checked reference photos of neighborhoods, and made mental note of how some are quite dense; however, I still wanted to give some homes yards where I could include such details as laundry lines and swing sets—even though the street is at the back of the layout, I was thinking in terms of photography, which can be done from any angle.

My first round of choices was surprising: five houses instead of just three. They included the Nansen Street farmhouse with a one-car garage; MPP house #302, with a Lake City House as a "mother-in-law" house tucked behind; and two shotgun houses, packed in next to the junkyard.

The one-car garage for the Nansen Street house only worked because it would sit up against the edge of the street, so it could fit into a tiny wedge of real estate adjacent to the Front Street bridge. It would sit at a lower level than the house as well, which would add interest to the property.

A "mother-in-law" house (a smaller house sometimes built in the backyard of another) had been in the back of my mind for a while, but I wasn't sure if it was feasible; by removing the extension from the back of the Lake City House, its footprint might become small enough to include.

Natives of the south, the shotgun houses would have to be "northeasternized" by converting them into tiny bungalows. Space for two was made possible by squeezing the junkyard building closer to the edge of the layout; to compensate for the loss of junk space, I widened its property at the back into an L-shape that wraps around behind the shotgun houses.

Blair Line makes a useful shotgun house (image courtesy Blair Line LLC).

This Mountaineer Precision Products house kit #301Z (discontinued).

This Mountaineer Precision Products house kit #302Z (discontinued).

The farmhouse from Nansen Street works as an urban/suburban home.

The Lake City House from Fannocreek Designs is wonderfully ordinary.

Dorothy's farmhouse from The Wizard of Oz inspired this kit from Animek.

Animek based this kit on Billy's House, as seen in Polar Express.

Paw of Bear makes this ranch house in two versions—the other is mirrored.

GCLaser makes both one- and two-car garages.

To get a rough idea of the potential visual dynamic of the street, I cobbled together a composite image using the product photos (rendered in black and white to neutralize the effect of colors I wouldn't use):

This image proved to be very helpful, and it went through several iterations before I settled on the final arrangement and selection of houses. Space did not allow a mother-in-law house of any kind, so I was back down to four. Still, it wound up looking much better than I'd anticipated. Here are the final choices:

#2, MPP house kit #302Z, with a GCLaser one-car garage
#4, Billy's House from Animek
#6 and #8, two Lake City Houses

The Nansen Street house got nixed because it just didn't seem to fit in with any of the other houses for this neighborhood. So the MPP house got moved down to take its place. Billy's House made it back in the cut despite my reluctance to include such a detailed kit at the back of the layout; I just liked the house too much. And since I had two Lake City houses, I decided to save myself the trouble of modifying the shotgun houses.

POSTSCRIPT With my decision to sell the layout, the Second Street house project has been dropped. Now, Dick's Auto Salvage is restored to its original orientation, Weller Fuel Oil has been relocated and expanded, and the cemetery has grown. This will greatly accelerate the completion of the layout.