Special Features

"Get out of town! ...I didn't know you did anything creative!!!"

-Marty McFly

Hill Valley

November, 1955

The home-made innards of the hover-converted Time Machine

Crafted over the Christmas holidays of 2006

THE LANCASTER EAGLE GAZETTE ARTICLE

My local newspaper, The Lancaster Eagle Gazette, spotted this website and contacted me requesting that I allow them to run a feature story on the model. I agreed and the article was published on their front page on BTTF Day - October 21, 2015.

The Online interview was published on the newspaper's website the evening of Oct 20, 2015

ONLINE INTERVIEW

The Making of Hill Valley

The Model Railroad

This section contains a gallery of various pictures taken during several different construction and renovation sessions .

Several of these sessions took place on the studio workbench, while others involved the table itself.

Most all of the shots in this gallery were taken in recent years... mostly since 2010. An unfortunate hard-drive catastrophe several years ago claimed a bunch of the earliest shots of the creation of the table itself as well as shots of the model prior to 2010.

Note to self: ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR STUFF!!!

This gallery is mostly self-explanatory with only several pictures containing captions.

ENJOY!!!

Renovation of Original 2005 Court House & Lawn

New clock face printed from computer onto decal medium. Newly updated clock lamp assembly - with LED installed - is seen to the left.

Brand new clock hands would soon be fabricated from thin brass stock.

(You'll notice here and elsewhere that I prefer to model on a glass surface)

Current Court House and Lawn - 1955 Configuration

Both Ready to Install On the Table and Plug Into the Grid

Shooting the Model For the Website

Setting up to get the shot of the hover-DeLorean above the River Rd Tunnel at night.

(The shot that greeted you on the home page)

I had purchased a few yards of sky-blue bed sheet-like material back around 2008 with the idea of pulling together a website project at that time, but my early 5mpx camera just didn't take a good enough quality shot to be presentable. Today's 20+ mpx cameras do the trick! The do-it-yourself website-building industry was still charging very high rates back then as well.

Labor Day 2015 was the day many of the actual website pictures were made.

Original 2005 Town Theater Gets Replaced

The original Town Theater from late 2005. Sort of thrown together at the time just to fill the space. The marquee was scratch-built at that time with the intention of transferring it to the permanent theater whenever that got built. Holt's Diner wasn't attempted until the new theater was underway.

Factory-kit buildings filled that space for a number of years.

(Please forgive the crudity of the model; I didn't have time to build it to scale or to... ...Oh, never mind!)

A peek inside the newly built Town Theater with the three custom-built LED-powered coming-attractions poster assemblies.

Original Texaco Filling Station Update and Relocation

Above and Below:

The original 2005 locations of the TEXACO station and of Lou's Diner. Both were about to swap places in a project which began in 2013 and concluded in early 2015. Lou's had already been updated in 2012 and TEXACO was about to be updated from its original 2005-built, 1985 configuration into its present 1955 configuration.