Plasticville Buildings Views
A frequent complaint I see about the Plasticville buildings that people have been using with Lionel and American Flyer trains for more than a half century is that they don+’t stay together well. This especially seems to be a problem with the modern reissues. Maybe the old molds are starting to wear out after all this time.
Plasticville buildings are a simple design, made of walls that snap together, permitting them to be assembled without glue and easily disassembled again for storage. Out of the box, Plasticville buildings are usually two-tone, with building walls of one color and the doors, windows and roof molded out of a different colored plastic. With few exceptions, Plasticville buildings are styled after 1950s suburban buildings, and the product line has not changed since the late 1950s.
Most Plasticville buildings are 1:64 scale with 1:48 scale doors, a design compromise that allows them to be used with O gauge, O27 gauge, or S gauge train layouts without looking far off-scale. This allowed one product line to serve Lionel's low-end and high-end product lines as well as American Flyer's product line in the 1950s. Later, as HO scale gained popularity, Bachmann produced a line of 1:87 scale buildings for that standard.
The first Plasticville product was a plastic fence, first marketed as a Christmas tree accessory. When Bachmann found out consumers were using its product on train layouts, it also added some other accessories such as trees, bushes, and bridges. By 1950, Bachmann had added houses and stores to the product line, and Plasticville quickly became the most popular brand of train buildings on the U.S. market. Bachmann added several buildings to the product line every year until 1958. Some of these buildings were of Bachmann design, but others came from competing product lines that Bachmann absorbed in the mid-1950s.
Plasticville Buildings Images
