Kellogg's Fire House From Engine House Project - Pt1

For the past couple of months I've been hinting at a project in the works for those diminutive Kellogg's Corn Flakes cereal premium fire trucks featured here. A normal person would have cranked this out in a couple of weeks but so far it's taken me several months and I'm still not finished! Well, okay, but at least now there's some progress to report.

This whole thing started last year when I bought a vintage 1975, unassembled paper N-Scale Engine House (also a Kellogg's cereal premium). The problem was two-fold:

-I don't operate N-scale model trains and don't have use for an engine house

-We didn't have a scanner big enough to scan the sheets

The graphics were cool enough that I thought they could be used for some other kind of building and when the idea of re-posting the Kellogg's fire engine cereal premiums took hold, so did the idea for the Fire House project. By this time we had a large format printer/scanner/copier and so the project took off - at a snail's pace. That's okay, at least it got started. This is my first ever attempt at putting together a building of my own design and I must say it's a lot more work than I expected. Along the way I did a lot of stupid things (my forehead has a bruise from constantly hitting it with my palm and exclaiming, "Doh! Why did I do that?")

Here's the original sheet for Kellogg's Engine House kit. It was already folded in half making it easier to scan.

Between Photoshop and Microsoft Picture Manager I cropped the walls and further cropped out various architectural elements from the original artwork like doors, windows, course of brick, etc., and saved them as individual files or 'parts' for the new 'kit'.

Here's a low quality B&W print-out of the wall posed behind one of the Kellogg's trucks just to see if the size was right

This is as far as I've gotten so far, a full size mock-up of the station. It's designed to accommodate the shortest engine and the fire chief's car, one in front of the other in one of the bays. That ensures all the other engines would fit as well.

I wanted the doors to be displayed open but I now know it will take a good deal of bracing in order for the front wall to sit nice and straight. The building may have to be glued to a base.

I designed three different side walls. Two have varying window arrangements and one is solid brick, with graphics used from a sheet of brick paper that's been laying around The Cave like, since forever.

That tower in the corner is meant to represent the hose drying tower found in fire houses. The other boxy looking thing is the HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) unit.

No bracing on the mock-up. It just ended up being square. It was the proportion that just worked out better for me.

There's still more work to do on the building. I have to re-arrange windows and some other odds-&-ends after which I'll build another mock-up

Enjoy! Opa Fritz and Oma Bettina