Won't you take me to ... Zeppelin Town!

Having obtained and painted the planes and zeppelins I now needed some more or less stationary targets as "destinations" for potential Zeppelin raids.  The problem of my chosen scale (1/1250) for the Airships became clear to me quickly.  In 1/1250 scale a standard train track is about 1 millimeter wide, or basically a pencil line.  In the end I found a replacement set of building for a newer Monopoly game very inexpensively ($4) and decided they would do.  Well after a bit of a delay as I fiddled around with arrangement of the buildings I have now completed a general British town for occasional Zeppelin visits. 

Here is what I had to work with.  I purchased a replacement set of the game Monopoly.  The boards are simple mdf all about the same width and of various lengths as can be seen. 



Apparently, somewhere along the way somebody decided to complicate Monopoly by adding different types of buildings you could construct.  The building set comes with several different color coordinated  types of buildings, the numbers in parentheses are how many came in the set.  On the left are the "bad" black buildings: prison (2), trash dump (3), and waste water center (3).  Next are the "good" red buildings: windmill (3), watertower (3), park (3), and futbol stadium (2 in set, but I only used 1).  Next comes the houses in beige in both single (8) and duplex (3).  And finally the factories in light blue, once again both single (8) and double (4).  Additionally, there were some silly red train markers and some sky scrapers, these last I plan on using as terrain for the jet version of Blood Red Skies as it is set in Korea and one style of the building are very "Asian" in appearance.  Also thoughts of a Godzilla game are intruding into my brain, but I definitely want to get the Zeppo game organized first. 

Here is our town's central hub.  I envision the large red building as the town hall with a pleasant park just outside.  To one side there are some model factories to demonstrate the town's forward thinking.  To the other side are some model middle class homes. 

Here is the same painted and weathered

The Economy is a fundamental feature of any polite society and here we see the factory district with some working class tenements to one side. 

And here is the factory district painted up.  Very gray, very drab, very insulated and walled off.  Definitely not the best section of town. 

Here is the basic version of the middle class section of town.  Lots of housing of mixed type with both row houses and single family interspersed.  At the center is the "High Street" with another park and the newest thing, the department store.  To set our town apart from and definitely above your average isolated hamlet. 

Showing an array of building materials there is older weathered bricks, newer brick construction, stucco and standard stone construction on display.  Naturally the department store exhibits only the finest stucco for the shoppers consideration.  Of course there is the obligatory park in the district and municipal water for all's convenience. 

Here we have the "Posh" end of town.  The houses of the rich are much more spaced out and of course include municipal services like running water and their own park.  Plus that most modern convenience of them all (for pre war Europe) the Futbol Stadium. 

Painted up I was trying to emphasize the sense of space in the "Posh" end of town.  I also decided to paint the Futbol stadium up in the colors of Liverpool as they had the first stadium finished in 1910.  This construction began in 1905 and was finished one wall at at time to build the entire structure.  Commentators of the day compared Goodison Park's exterior walls to the S.S. Mauretania, the largest ship at that time (Titanic and her sisters were just starting construction). 

Here we enter the arena of the truly unfortunate.  To the left you have the work house with its endless piles of rocks that "need" to be busted into smaller rocks (the most common sort of work at a work house).  In the center front we have the asylum for the mentally unhealthy, and to the right we have the local prison. 

The prisons of this era were supposed to be painted an off white.  The surviving examples are kept in that state by the National trust.  However, at the time and on the ground the prisons were rarely kept up to the "official" appearance.  I opted for my lightest shade of gray in indicate the once upon a time white nature of the building and walls. I also opted to paint the poor house and asylum in the same color. Behind the asylum there is a windmill.  The windmill for electrical power generation was invented in Britain in 1873.  The first use for this electricity was at the inventor's home.  He offered the excess power to the local city but they turned down his free power as "electricity was the devil's work."  Eventually he did find a government agency that was interested in steady cheap power and was hired to build an electrical power windmill for an asylum.  You have got to keep the power flowing to the insane apparently.  From there there was slow but steady growth in Britain for using windmills to power asylums and prisons. 

The careful eye on the above picture will see one of the many problems I found in painting these buildings.  If you look very closely at the front of the asylum you will note I painted on the door as detailed on the building.  After painting on the door I noticed that the door walks into the chimney.  lets just say whoever designed these buildings did not think them through at all.  As a result I kipped most details on the buildings hoping that the magic wash would bring them out, but alas it did not. 

Here we have our final building sheet, a modern industrial plant.  R&D in the central offices, manufacturing and fabrication in the factories across the way, and some chemical research and work going on in the buildings and vats to the right. 

The third and final use for windmills in Britain pre WWI was for forward thinking industrialiasts who wanted their own source of power to run the manufacturing efforts.  Thus our modern "plant" includes two windmills for steady and plentiful power. 

Here we have an example of a "town" using all six blocks. 

And here is one more lay out.  While not geometric in design, the rectangles do allow for a general "town" to take shape when placed together.  Anton threatens me that he has some more monopoly building so this collection will eventually increase in the future, but for now the basics are in place. 

On to the boats part of this game and its conclusion.