I have seen the structures by Archistories and liked the appearance from photos I've seen on the web. I ordered the Streckenposten 271 (Railway office '271') kit #110181. It is about $20 from online dealers in the US. Railway Office Archistories kits are made from laser-cut cardstock. The parts are printed on different color papers, and are pre-textured and details are already scribed in the paper. This allows for excellent detail on different parts - the 'mortar' lines between the bricks are black, and the roof shingles are neatly scribed in a lighter gray color. Railway Office 2 The laser-cutting of these parts is extremely precise. You need to cut parts off the different individual cards. I found a normal X-Acto #11 blade was too thick. I needed to change to a #11 scalpel blade to avoid damaging small parts. Railway Office 3 Many parts are extremely small. The brick window sill parts, for example, are less than 1mm tall, and only 3 or 4 mm wide. If you are not extremely careful when cutting the parts from their cardboard sprues, you can easily damage an edge or corner. It is also difficult to manipulate such small pieces, even with super-sharp tweezers. There were times where it took several attempts to pick up and turn over a small part, simply because it would slip out of my grip and fall back down. Railway Office 4 The instructions were extremely clear and direct to follow. Railway Office 5 I used Noch Laser-Cut Adhesive and Aleene's Quick Dry Tacky Glue to assemble the parts. The Noch glue dries with a slight gloss, so any stray blobs of glue on the paper are visible. The Tacky Glue dries more matte, but as the name says it is Quick Dry so there is less working time before the glue develops a skin on the surface. I'll see if the non-Quick Dry Tacky Glue works better. Railway Office 6 While the supplied parts are very precisely cut, cutting and removing them from their cards introduces some variance. Rough or imprecise cutting can roughen the end of a part, raising paper fibers. Or you cut a part at a slight angle from 90 deg. You can see how the roof is slightly mis-aligned at one corner. And I didn't notice that one of the interior roof trusses wasn't flush with the structure's ceiling. At Z-scale, even a 0.5mm difference in alignment can be visible. Unlike plastic parts, you cannot cut conservatively and then sand down any edges that need adjustment. You must be exact on every cut. I spent about 4-5 hours putting this kit together. Again, it takes a lot of patience to work with parts this size. Overall, I'm very satisfied with my first Archistories kit. It looks great at normal viewing distances, but slightly off when viewed close up. I'll probably rebuild this kit, and then look at their more complicated kits. Cheers!
Nice review, thanks for posting. I have several of their kits waiting for assembly too, but I'm not sure I will actually build them. I changes towards trying to scratchbuild everything on my module to prototype photos. I think you did a very good job building it. So you didn't have to paint anything? My kits are old and printed on white cardstock so will need to be painted.
These kits are fully colored. The parts are printed on different colored and textured cardstock. I will likely give it some weathering powders for full effect. I might also consider replacing some smaller parts with brass or plastic details instead. Once you get really, really small it is difficult to keep paper parts intact. For example, the chimney is made from 7 separate parts, all just ~2mm wide. It is difficult to get them lined up perfectly and trimmed to fit the roofline exactly. I'd probably just carve a balsa chimney or use a painted plastic chimney from another kit. I did have an issue getting the roof on correctly - you can see the slight wobble in the roofline in picture 6 above. It is just a matter of more careful assembly, not any issue with the kit itself.
