Street Accessories - HO Scale

Street furniture for a city street in a ratio of 1:87

Parking meters, manhole covers, fire hydrants, trash bins, benches to rest on, a corner with a mailbox and, with them, a phone booth with folding doors. The set brings together the small things nobody notices in a street until they are missing, and adds to them a woman rummaging in her handbag for small change.

That woman is in fact the key to the whole content. Her gesture ties the parking meters and the phone booth together, because both were operated with coins. Placed at the booth or at a meter she therefore gives the scene a sense that the objects alone, set out along a sidewalk, would never have.

A phone booth with folding doors is a period piece. This type disappeared from American streets with the arrival of open stands and later with cell phones, so it places a scene clearly in the twentieth century and suits older layouts.

The manhole covers are among the most useful things in the package. They break up the uniform surface of a roadway, which modelers often leave empty, and they cost only a few minutes of work. It is advisable to set them out irregularly rather than in a straight line.

The size abbreviation HO equals a scale of 1:87. The set suits the finishing of a street that is already built, that is the stage at which the houses and sidewalks stand and the scene is short of the last few percent of credibility.

The benches and bins can be divided between several places on the board. There is no need to use them all at once; quite the opposite, in fact, as scattered along the whole length of a street they read more naturally than gathered into one scene.