Please do--I'm quite curious about a Main Street Station (and the water tank).

OK, I now have a better picture of what you're planning. You might think about just putting a straight length of monorail track cutting across the very front of your layout. Your train isn't a bad model of the early freight train, so you might also think about getting a Schuco monorail. It will fit better scalewise, too.

I also have a better idea of what's going on with your track-jumping front truck. Unfortunately, you can't play with the track curvature, like when you're using non-roadbed track. So, you will need to tweak the engine itself.

One thing you can do is re-mount the pilot truck pivot to a swing link, the other end of which is pinned under the center of the pilot beam, or a little back from that point. This will allow the front truck wheels to avoid hitting the cylinder front on curves. If you do that, you will dispense with the pilot truck contact plate, and you'll need to cut away some plastic on the underside of the pilot deck, in between the cylinders. Also, cut back the sides of the truck frame. The wide truck frame tends to hit the insides of the cylinders on curves.

Here you go, Steve. I believe. You modified one of these before.

http://www.walthers.com/exec/search?quick=538-501

And the water tower is a smaller version of the Rio Grande one. I can't remember who made it since it has been a long time now. I found it at Loose Caboose in Napa, Calif. Also, there are HO covered platforms which match New Orleans Square Station on Walthers online catalog as well.

http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/345-2013

Ah, yes, I did modify one of those. I think you can get by with using only one--there's plenty of extra material there with the additional wing.

'Course, the real Menomonee Falls Depot looked a lot different:

there are 4 wide doors and 4 narrow doors in each kit. Main street station needs 7 wide doors so to use one kit you need to use the narrow doors in places where the width is not as noticeable, like the platform entrances and the baggage door that is never used.

Well, unless that Missouri station turns out to be any better, I'm good with the Menomonee station. This being my first time out the gates I just want to invoke the overall feel and look. I know I will enjoy the details of the true recreation at some later point in time.

A quick question here. You can see I'm just using foam board as my base in bought at Lowes. I'm thinking about going ahead and pouring the street itself with the Woodland Scenics kits. Will those chemicals and paints eat away at the foam board? The board does seem to have that shiny type coat on it so it's not on the foam directly.

TrainFan,

It is WI train station. For some reason I was thinking Falls was in Missouri. Wathers has the station, water tower, GFRR station and platform like New Orleans Square.

Hope it helped.

If you avoid the Oil based paint and use only the woodland scenics or other acrylic paints and glues you should not have any problems.

The model that can be kitbashed into MSS is shown at the link immediately below. It goes my several names by different companies but still appears to be available (I did mine back in 1999). It took two kits to have enough parts and I bought some parts for the bay windows on the backside.

http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/538-501

Jazzfan did a great job and even lit his version:
http://burnsland.com/disneyrailroads/viewtopic.php?t=2053&start=0

Below is a link to some of the things I have done including MSS from several angles and the paper model castle from The Disney Experience ( http://www.disneyexperience.com/models/?page=1 ). The Disney Experience has some great models of the Castle and MSS, but they don't have Main Street Buildings. The Disney Experience also has a links to other Disney paper model sites like Haunted Dimensions (http://www.haunteddimensions.raykeim.com/index380.html) which has great Haunted Mansion paper models. I've become a big fan of paper models because A) I'm no good at painting, B) they have great details, C) you can scale them to any size you want (I rescale everything in Photoshop to HO to go with my Schuco Monorails), E) they are very inexpensive, and F) if you screw something up, you just print a new part.

http://alturl.com/tbjed

Also if you need to turn your monorail on a slightly tighter radius, Don's Trains on ebay offers monorail curved track in two tighter radii. I've used their custom monorail track on my own layout as seen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPAmaDtbnKk

Keep us up to date on your progress!

Cheers,
Don in Chicagoland.