Budget Model Railroading. One Buck HO Christmas Buildings.

I can't believe I'm doing a Christmas post before Thanksgiving, but Dollar Tree has come through with a very nice offering for HO scale railroaders that is too good to wait on.

HO has long been a popular train choice for decorative holiday displays.  However, HO modelers have been a bit left out of having properly sized bargain-priced holiday buildings.  Previous dollar store versions have tended to be porcelain and smaller than HO in size.  Most larger ceramic Christmas buildings were closer to O scale and considerably more expensive.  Even when ceramic HO'ish sized examples were available they were often quite soft in detail.

However, this current batch of Dollar Tree plastic buildings is better on all counts. It's very close to HO scale and though the style is still exaggerated and sometimes oversized, detailing is much crisper than most porcelain examples. At time of publishing there are 4 different styles available.

This Church is a bit compressed in footprint, but still nicely sized.

The Post Office or Hotel could represent a variety of buildings with a sign change

A Charming Blue house

The Size of the Doors is a bit varied but all 4 are fairly well sized for HO. In a very clever touch, all the buildings have a round cavity on the bottom where a common electric tea light can be used for illumination

For those calling around to see if there are any available near you, there appear too be two different SKU's used for these buildings.  A complete set including accessories (many unfortunately O scale) is listed on the Dollar Tree website, but is currently out-of-stock.

I'm think these little buildings are charming.  They're nice, sturdy little structures that should even hold up to handling by children.  Further, when the holidays are over no special care is necessary when storing them for next year.   The availability of Dollar Tree stock is unpredictable at best so if you want these I recommend getting to your local store as soon as possible.