It is a lot easier and quicker to build a baseball park on your layout than it sounds. It doesn’t take that much time and isn’t really labor intensive. If I can do it, anyone can!

My layout needed a baseball park in the worst way. I wanted to place it right next to my 1950's town, on the way to the main train station. There was room available on the board, so I started the search for the fundamentals: ball players, grandstands, a radio and television booth, bleachers, dugouts, a batting screen, foul poles, and fences and walls with advertisements on them. The night lights were easy. I used Lionel #195 floodlights in a triangle pattern.

For the field itself, I started with a thin, flat piece of plywood and spray painted it green, – emerald green, remembering the first time I walked through the upper stands of Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and seeing the most beautiful green field. I’ve never forgotten it. The next spray was tennis clay brown for the infield, base paths, home plate, batting circles, foul lines and pitcher’s mound. I glued lead weights scaled to the size of the bases and painted them white, along with the pitching rubber.

I found the basswood grandstands through an advertisement in a TCA magazine and purchased two bleachers, a radio booth, dugouts and five grandstands, - one a v-sloped wrap around. These came from PM in Bay Village Ohio. Coaching boxes were built from cut plastic and thin white tape from Hobby Lobby. The same thin white tape was used for the foul lines. After spraying the grandstands blue, I was ready to find the players and people. The people were easy: Circus People makes four types of “O” gauge people – men, women, girls and boys in six-packs. I purchased 100 packs of each at Trainsource Texas and super glued them to the blue stands and bleachers. I also added refreshment stands selling soda and hotdogs, a ticket booth to purchase tickets and two outhouses also came from PM. I picked up a flag for center field from a hobby shop and added trees purchased from Trainsource Texas.

Next came my hunt for the right ball players. An October visit to the York, Pennsylvania TCA Eastern meet helped me complete this step. I found pitchers, catchers, coaches, managers, outfields, infielders and, of course, umpires made by Artista. There are two entire teams – each with different uniforms. I accumulated over thirty-six men plus a ticket vendor, a hotdog vendor, a broadcaster and a sanitation man with a cart, broom, and shovel. It looks like something out of the fifties.

The next step was to build a scale 6-foot outfield fence out of balsa wood, spray it green and decal it with original 1950's advertising. Now advertisers like Western Union, Esso, Sunoco, Gulf Oil, a suit company, beer and Coca-Cola grace the fence. The decals also came from Trainsource Texas. I made foul poles about 12" high at the left and right field foul lines out of barbeque skewers painted white. Mark Whetzel and I then made a large scoreboard on a blue background showing the box scores of an actual 1950's game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. It was computer-generated and printed out to fit into the Lionel #410 billboard. The scoreboard also contains a Benrus clock, showing a late afternoon time, and a Schaefer Beer logo. The game is in the bottom of the ninth, with a tied score. The bleachers are still full with over 500 people anxiously awaiting the outcome. There are pitchers warming up in the bullpen and the night lights are just coming on. The game goes on as the trains leave the main station on the way to their destinations, whistles and horns blowing, and the engineers waving at the fans.