Book excerpt: This invaluable book is essential reading for all railway modellers, whatever their level of expertise. The author provides an overall understanding of the purpose of making buildings for a model railway and covers their construction, their positioning and how to light them. Topics covered include: Railway and non-railway model buildings, explaining how the latter can also enhance your trains. Modelling attitudes, the use of scale, levels of detail and both regional vernacular and railway architecture. Ready-made buildings that you can buy and demonstrates how you can adapt them to your own particular purposes. Different materials available for building structures and ways of choosing, finding, measuring and recording suitable prototypes. Step by step construction of a cardboard building kit to illustrate the use of basic modelling tools and to explain essential procedures and techniques. Using and modifying 'out-of-the-box' model buildings and explores the subtleties of making model railway buildings from scratch without the use of a kit, or anything more than hand-tools and a few sheets of suitable material. Guidance on the appropriate use of texture and colour, and shows how walls, doors, windows, roofs and chimneys can be created, painted, detailed and finished off. Many aspects of lighting, including external lighting, such as street and platform lights, and the internal lighting of buildings, the problems they pose and how they can be resolved.