Book recommendations and opinions: styrene modelling

[sd40dash2]

Evergreen in 2000 published the book Styrene modeling: How to build, paint, and finish realistic styrene models by Bob Hayden. Can anyone here offer opinions on it?

Also, I know that MR published several nice softcover books on things like freight car loads, detailing and such. After a few google searches I did not come up with anything from them or anyone else with quite the same scope as the Evergreen book.

There are some excellent youtube videos on the subject but the idea here is to find some nice light hard-copy reading on styrene modelling for the railway hobby. Just wondering if the Evergreen book is it or is there some superior product I'm missing?

Thanks in advance for your input.

[Christian]

Alan Armitage made "The Case For Styrene" in Model Railroader in the late fifties. The Evergreen book is an expansion. I'm sure Hayden and Armitage crossed paths. Armitage also wrote a series of one-page notes that were published by Kemtron - later Precision Scale - in a loose-leaf form packaged in an envelope.

Armitage had a huge impact on model building in general with his work for Revell. The huge sailing ship models were his work and still in production seventy-five years later. In terms of railroad subjects, all the Revell structures were his and it was hard to find a model railroad layout last century that didn't have one of these designs. Most have been available under many brand names ever since.

There may be styrene modeling books in other hobbies - ships, military, and so forth. But I'm not active in other hobbies! I did a Google search on "professional model building book" and came up with lots and lots of hits. A search on "building architectural models" also turns up lots and lots of hits.

[wagnersteve]

Sunday, September 10, starting at 5:25 p.m., EDT

Alan Armitage had been very badly injured while working for a railroad, I think the Boston & Maine. In addition to pioneering in the use of high impact polystyrene in model railroading, he introduced the use of paints that used casein as their "vehicle", which he also wrote about in Model Railroader.

[sd40dash2]

Indeed, looks like the book is dedicated to Mr Armitage "who introduced styrene to generations of modellers."

It appears Jack Burgess also contributed, so it would seem the book is far humbler than it should be!

I'll take some to sift through those google searches Christian mentioned.

[valenciajim2]

I remember purchasing the book about 20+ years ago. At the time I was really impressed and learned a lot. However, I am not sure how well the book holds up to contemporary modeling standards.

[sd40dash2]

Thanks for all the responses thus far. It sounds like experts wrote the Evergreen book, so I am definitely interested in learning from them.

Another one with a similar but wider scope, 186pp and 2-3x the cost seems to have been published out of the UK in 2019 titled Model Builders' Manual: A Practical Introduction to Building Plastic Model Kits. Author: Matt Irvine

[edwardsutorik]

I believe Alan Armitage did a lot of the artwork in the Kemtron catalog. And I believe my first source of styrene sheet was, not coincidentally, through Kemtron. Well, from my local hobbyshop, really. Early sixties.


Ed

[sd40dash2]

Update: I received the book shown in my Sept 11 post and highly recommend it for anyone interested in reading a well-researched and illustrated book. The quality is excellent and it covers the more general modelling topics that affect most of us. It has a scope that is much wider than just model trains which makes it nice to get a feel for where we fit in to the grand scheme of things. Worth the money and effort to track down IMO.