Readers on this blog will recall a number of posts related to making your freight cars dual era. I often make one side of the car appropriate weathering wise and other identifiers (COTS, ACIs, etc) for one era and the reverse side of the car appropritate for another. Roofwalks obviously can put a crimp on this strategy depending on the breadth of your eras. This works well if you have a shelf layout where only one side of your car is normally visible.
With this post, I want to illustrate a dual era structure. By changing signs and surrounding details, one can backdate or “forward date” a structure.
When I lived in Roswell, NM, in the early 1990s, I often drove by a truck freight terminal. I often thought how I’d like to have a non-rail business such as this. By changing out the trucks and trailers from time to time, one could introduce a little variety on the layout. Sometimes the terminal was quiet, other times, there’d be many trailers parked at the dock.
With this series, I am going to share how I took the leftovers from Hernandez Distributing (originally two Walthers Grocery Supply kits) project and created a dual era truck terminal that will be used to portray a late-1960-early 1970s Pacific Intermountain Express operation and a Consolidated Freightways operations set in 1990 around the time I lived in Roswell. Just for fun, I theorized that Gillette Western also occasionally uses the terminal when it is in the early era JUST because I have a very cool Gillette Western truck and trailer and want to be able to use it! (Hey, it could have happened!)
Ok, here is the building I made from leftovers of two Grocery Distributor kits.

Nothing too fancy. This is what it looks like with no details to give it context, to evoke an era.

There is one lone sign that I attached to the building. Could signal that another company uses the facility from time to time or it could be the relic of a long ago era.


Actually a pretty fun building to kitbash. I only had to cut one large door opening and I had to remove the second story.

Everything came with the Grocery Distributor kit except the roof and roof details. They are from a Walthers roof top details kit. (The roof is cut from a sheet of styrene.)

It is compressed a little, but it is adequate to suggest a viable business.

Next post, this building will be detailed out as a Pacific Intermountain Express terminal in the late 1960s.

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