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In the early days model railroaders built their houses and other buildings from scratch, there were no premade ready to go houses and buildings. At this stage there were not even any kits you could run down to the local hobby store and buy. You had to come up with an idea and figure out how to recreate it using whatever materials you had at hand or could pick up at your local store.

To build a house or any other building from scratch takes many hours of painstaking work. Working with a scale ruler you would first draw your building plans so that you had a starting point. Once you knew what you were building, you could start gathering the materials you needed to build it. Many of the older scratch built models were built much the same way a real house was built, one piece at a time. That meant you had to find the right sized materials and cut each individual board out by hand. Or as another option you could take a thin piece of sheet stock and using a ruler and sharp knife gently carve each board into it.

Similarly each piece of window frame and door frame had to be cut from lengths of wood, if you were building a house, this could take several hours to complete. Assembling your new house meant hours assembling small sections only to have to wait for them to dry before you could move on until the final product was assembled and ready to be painted. There were very few shortcuts and to create a model building that looked realistic was a task of many patient hours from conception to completion.

The Plastic Revolution

In the early 1950s the very first mass produced plastic model kits arrived in the stores, made by Aurora they quickly gained popularity. The model railroad industry soon joined in with easy to assemble houses and buildings. These kits featured preformed parts that made assembling buildings so much easier. By using injection molding manufacturers were able to add realistic details to every surface of the building. Walls could now be made that had each individual board or brick carefully outlined and given extra marking that could show wear and tear.

Details such as doors and windows no longer had to be built one piece at a time; many of them were molded in place while the higher quality kits came with individual doors and windows that could be glued in place. For the beginner many of these kits were molded in colors that could be used in a pinch that did not need painting, although the results were somewhat inferior to taking the time to paint each detail carefully.

The quality of these kits improved over the years as they became more popular and better manufacturing processes were used. With the advent of the computer age hobbies like this have become less popular and the number of plastic model manufacturers has declined, along with this the availability of plastic models has gone down.