The Tinplate and Midwestern is an 8x8 layout using O27-profile track. I run vintage Lionel, Marx, American Flyer, and Ives O gauge trains, mostly made from pressed metal. I don’t pay a lot of attention to scale, and I really don’t worry about realism. Simulating a real railroad seems too much like work. One thing I learned from my dad is that watching an old train rumble around in circles, spewing out ozone and fake smoke and the aroma of old lubricants after a long day at work is very relaxing.

I appreciate the pulling power and quiet operation of modern can motors but they just don’t give off the same essence. They also cost a lot more. I don’t do electronics, because after spending 8+ hours at work trying to make computers do what some salesman promised they’d do out of the box, I really don’t want to fight with undersized computers inside my trains. Some old trains can be finicky too, but working on old mechanical marvels doesn’t remind me of my day job.

The town is made up mostly of tinplate buildings. I have a few vintage Marx, Skyline, and H&H tinplate buildings but a lot of what I have are modern gift tins, shaped like buildings. I get lucky and find a tin in a retail store about once a year. I bought a few tins off eBay, but most of my buildings came from garage sales, estate sales, and thrift stores. It’s taken me about three years to accumulate what I have.

I also have a few paper buildings. I’ve designed a few myself using tools like Photoshop and Visio, but there’s a surprising amount of paper out there. Tabletop wargamers often use paper buildings to build their scenes because paper is cheap to produce and distribute electronically and cheap to buy. Unfortunately most of it leans in the medieval/fantasy direction, but there are a few lines of gangster-themed buildings that look good with vintage trains, and the most popular gaming scale, 28mm, works out to roughly 1:60 scale, which is close to the scale of a typical postwar Lionel train. If I were starting out today, I could use paper buildings almost exclusively.

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