The Chemical Plant Kit by AHM is it base off of a real chemical plant? What else could be added to it to make it come close to a chemical plant? Or what else could it be used as far as rail service? Thanks
Wow... this is an ancient building kit in terms of N Scale history. I forget whether the OEM is / was Vollmer, Faller or Pola but it's definitely a European item. I would characterize it as "very compressed" versus chemical plants with which I'm familiar. (And I spent a fair amount of my life along the "scenic" "Chemical Coast" of New Jersey. It makes sense that this would be a highly compressed plant in order to fit the small layouts that were being built at the time. By today's somewhat "larger" standards, it wouldn't really be of a size large enough for any kind of rail service, but Rule #1 always applies. I could see this as any kind of general industrial plant, not necessarily just chemicals. Incidentially, there's an AHM et al "repair shop" kit hidden inside this kit; it's over on the left side. I wonder if the top right hand corner of the box once had a Woolworth's red "Sale!" circular sticker attached to it. It looks like the residue of a sticker like that is still there.
The tallest building in the group was sold separtely as a grain elevator and as pointed out previously the red brick building was sold as a repair shop. Probably the other buildings were available separately too. Thus while each building may have had "real" European prototypes, combining them into one industry is probably a stretch of the imagination. I have seen some nice looking kit bashes of these, made into respectable US looking industries, back when we did not have US prototype structures (1970's).
Yep, those wooden barrels and a wagon wheel scream "chemicals" to me. You gotta wonder what the people who come up with the names of these kits were drinking.
Yeah... that kit is basically an amalgam of other individual kits from the late 1960's. Not all chemical plants were the size of a Dow or Corning etc... and chemicals could be concoctions brewed in small batches by innovative chemists of the day. It still happens today... slap a sign on the side of that structure that says "BULLFROG SNOT" and you've got a chemical factory that makes a product used by model railroaders.
Sort of fits into a steam era and I recognize several parts as being also used in a Pola sawmill kit. I could see a small outfit located in the Southwest, maybe California, just because of the tiled roofs in the early 1900s. Not a turpentine distilllery but maybe something close although the lack of a boiler plant and stacks sort of cancells that notion. Maybe a tanbark outfit as far as lumber related. But it is a good example of the types of kits we had to work with in the early days.
I was looking this morning or a picture of some of my trains from the early days of N scale for another thread, and there was that AHM chemical factory. I think the roofs are missing from some of the structures because I thought the Spanish tile roofs were not too appropriate. 1973 photo
