While cleaning out my late mother’s vacant house and garage, I came across a large scale model of Central Methodist Church, Houston, where my mom and dad were married in 1935. My dad built the model in 1947 to use as a fund-raising gimmick for a new church building. The model was built of plywood, with hardwire cloth for the windows. It is approximately 18 inches wide by 2 feet long, somehat bigger than O scale, perhaps close to 1/29th scale. The prototype church still stands next to the track of the Magnolia Branch/ Booth Yard Lead of the former Houston Belt & Terminal RR in Houston, on Wayside Drive. The building has been through three or four congregations since the late 1940s, when the original congregation moved to a sprawling modern new building and changed the name of the church to Parker Memorial. Ironically, the new church was torn down a dozen or more years ago. The model was displayed in that late 1940s church until its congregation shrank and merged with another church. The model then went in a “heritage room” church museum for the merged church, and then those old memorabilia were cleared out some years ago and ended up in the family garage, which was my father’s sheet metal shop back in the 1950s. That funny triangular sectioned thing in front of the lower photo is some kind of weight and shape former piece my dad used in his sheet metal business. I didn't notice it was blocking the picture until I was retouching out the cluttered background. I photographed the old church model with the new digital camera I bought myself for Christmas. I plan to bring the model back with me to Corpus Christi on a future trip to Houston and place it “on permanent loan” (the way museums do with works of art) with a local friend who has been building an outdoor G scale layout. Here is a picture of the prototype church building, along with an N scale church loosely based on Central Methodist. The N scale church was bashed mainly from a radical reusing of pieces from a Heljan kit for a Danish passenger railway depot. In both cases, the front was "selectively compressed" from 3 arched entries to 2. The N scale kit had a front wall and a back wall, one with 2 arch doorways and one with 2 square doorways, so I went with that. I think my dad was just trying to keep the display model from getting too big.
