Constructing a patch town

[nekom]

I want to construct a patch town, consisting of several dozen similar houses. For those of you who don't know, a patch town (at least as it is referred to around here) is a small group of houses, all built during the same time frame by a coal mine developer to serve as housing for miners and their families. Now I model circa 1980 or so, so while these houses were built identically, they have since changed hands (mines no longer own the towns), some have burned down, some have had additions to them or paint jobs, almost all of the outhouses have been removed.

Most towns also had a company store, which was either demolished or found a new use. Nearly all patch towns in this area have some form of industrial relic as well, such as old mine tipples or abandoned beehive coke ovens. I've never really scratch built anything so I'm sort of at a loss as to where to begin on this. Is cardstock the way to go, or is there some preferred material or method? This is in HO scale if that makes much of a difference. Any suggestion or direction would be greatly appreciated.

 

[UP2CSX]

There are really a lot of choices, depending on your budget and building skills. What I would get is a couple each of the Rix one story houses. There are three different styles so you can make the house look a little different as people changed and added on. They are easy to build and only cost $11-$12 each. For the Company Store, Life-Like has Al's General Store, which is really train set type kit but has good detail and is easily modified for a number of uses for only $9. For a really nice coal tipple that can be modeled in any state of repair you want, check out Laser Kit's Martinsburg Coal Mine. It's more expensive at $63 but it should be a centerpiece of your layout so you want something that looks real and convincing.

There are a lot of different choices. I suggest you spend some time browsing Walthers on-line catalog (www.walthers.com) and see what catches your fancy. Search using key words like "company homes" and "coal mines" and you'll get plenty of hits.

My sister-in-law was born in a patch (Thompson #2) so I'm real familiar with how they look now.

 

[nekom]

Thanks for the tip, I never thought to search for company houses, and patch house turned up very little. They do seem to have some very nice kits indeed! The only problem is that with the quantity of houses I want to have in my patch (I'm really shooting for between 2 and 3 dozen), kits would really cost a fortune. Of course a little mix and match might work, too. I know in the patch town I grew up in, one side of the street had larger two story houses, while the other had single story homes. I guess the difference was either for larger families or for the higher-ups. And even though the town I grew up in was originally a coal patch, a few of the houses were newer, modular and mobile homes. I guess I want the effect of a typical patch town built in the 20's or 30's as well as the changes into the 1980s. So maybe I'll wind up a little more diverse than I first thought.

 

[UP2CSX]

A lot of the original company houses have been torn down because they weren't built too well in the first place and modular homes were placed on the lots. That's the biggest change I've noticed over the years so, if you want to build a patch based in the present era, some modular type homes or trailers are almost a must. As you said, larger families got the two story houses and the superintendent and foremen usually had some nice homes, located as far away from the miners as possible. Many of the coal branches were abandoned and torn up but a few have either been abandoned in place or still see a few trains a month. That gives you some options in modeling the rail service. The other big change I've seen is paving, curbs, and sidewalks, These were never installed in the original patch but have slowly been done over the past 60 or so years so some parts of the town look more modern and others still are just a dirt road with houses.

Oh, one last thing that was really striking is garages. No miner ever owned a car when the patch was built so no homes had garages. Over the years, as the miners prospered or others moved in, more garages got built and I now see everything from rickety old wood garages to modern steel buildings. Another detail to add as you go along.