There’s a section of my railroad that will be a big city reminiscent of San Francisco. As I was thinking about what I wanted to include and it dawned on me that I really wanted a steep hill with some Victorian-style houses. I have an old IHC kit from the 1980s with the five San Francisco Painted Ladies at Alamo Square. But those are exact HO scale and much too large for the area I had in mind.

One day I was browsing a Hallmark store and spotted a small corner ice cream shop ornament. The size was maybe a bit smaller than HO scale, but not by much. I picked it up thinking it would be perfect for a corner spot. Later I found out that Hallmark had an entire line of almost HO-scale Victorians in their Nostalgic Houses and Shops series. They started in the 1980s and have added one every year or so.

These were the perfect size. So I hit up eBay and, over the course of a few months, built a nice collection of smaller Victorian-style houses and shops.

A friend of mine, knowing about my collection, gave me four Noma house ornaments that reminded me of some of the turreted homes in the Haight-Ashbury area. They didn’t have any window panes, so I used MicroMark’s Micro Krystal Klear to “paint” the panes in. It’s white when you apply it, but it dries clear like a sheet of glass.

To round out the collection, I found some smaller N-scale houses for the background. They were a set of four Italianate stick houses that even came with a tiny San Francisco cable car. No markings though. I wish I knew what brand they are.

The first step was to make a hill. I used those big, wide cardboard chunks that come in IKEA furniture boxes. I tried several different arrangements until I landed on a zig-zag approach. I placed the Hallmark houses with their generous detail at the front. The Noma houses came next in a stair-step fashion behind the Hallmarks. Lastly the little Italianate houses went in the back, creating a nice forced perspective.

I scenicked the hill, placed the houses, and then built a retaining wall. We have a lot of old retaining walls in the City, and I patterned the relief on the ones we have here in the Sunset. Lately I’ve been installing miniature lights. I think it looks awesome at night. There’s still a bit more finishing to go, but I like how it turned out.