I'm slowly getting better; thanks for asking. Today's the last day of five for the Paxlovin anti-viral, so I'm supposed to retest in 24 hours according to the doc. I think I'll wait until Monday AM or when the symptoms have subsided a bit more. I tend to jam up bronchially (sic) with anything: common cold, flu, allergies, and now Covid. It's something that's come on late in life. Whatever, this hasn't been too bad, which might be the anti-viral impact. I guess the vaxx/vaxx/booster regimen helped out as well. Whatever, I had neglected to follow through on the second booster, and the doc says no point now
The staircase is intended to look sorta like a stairway, but certainly not a nice neat scale representation. I suspect if you were a 1/48-scale dude trying to get up that stairway, you might need a stepladder to help you. Each step is probably a foot-and-a-half high (or more). That's the great thing about this tinplate stuff - it's just supposed to look sorta like what you're going for, certainly not scale/accurate by any measure. Kinda makes me feel like an interloper here on
The Modelers Thread.
I started over on the second tower. I had plans to glaze the windows and include an interior a la the old Marx playsets that had lithography on both the exterior and interior, but that got too hairy. I bought a new set of Xacto blades for the knife, but had trouble cutting the mullions on the windows (printed on cardstock). I was getting a lot of incomplete cuts in the corners, leaving fuzzy bits which was driving me nuts, so finally I just said the heck with it and blacked the windows using MS Paint.
Howard Lamey designed the graphics originally, I believe using a prewar or postwar Hornby tower as his inspiration. He included a two-dimensional stairwell simply printed on one end. From what I remembered, the actual Hornby tower, at least the version I've seen, had an actual three-dimensional staircase on the end, stamped in tin and attached to the side via a few tabs. Sarge confirmed this, sending me a few pics of the tower he's had since he was a kid, so I asked Howard for permission to edit his graphics so I could add a bumped-out version of the stairs (to which he graciously agreed). I've gotten pretty proficient with MS Paint, so it was no big deal to grab the 2-D bits to use to fashion a 3-D version, meanwhile editing out the 2-D printing on the end. Blacking out the windows was much more painful. Cutting out the windows/doors, then cementing a cardstock print in each opening gives it a bit of depth, makes it a little bit less boring.
So anyway, here's the four sides and staircase for tower 2:
I have at least one or two more paper models I want to try, plus an old Plasticville tower that's been on the layout for thirty years and is starting to fall apart; the plan is to do all four or five of them and see how they turn out. So many things I should be doing instead of this, but where's the fun in that?
so yours could be legit 
