The Lego garage

Lego offered this garage for use with their little H0 scale cars. The illustration is from a folder from ca. 1958 (Belgian edition, where 90 francs would also buy you a dozen loaves of bread). In the next 10 years it would get a grey floor plate and then double doors opening sideways before being removed from the range together with the little cars. 

The floor with door could also be bought separately, and were incorporated in the Esso service station as well. The 1955 Byggebog (Building Book) devoted a page to showing how the service station could be built with a double garage (shown on Brick Fetish here), which gave me the idea of building my garage to go with my service station.

I used the illustration above in my folder as a building guide. Since the Esso service station is built from parts in cellulose acetate plastic, the garage had to be as well. The first row of bricks held pretty well to the floor plate, but the next was typically very loose. So I again used my childhood trick of clamping in paper from a note block to increase the grip. If you look closely at the photographs (click to enlarge) then you'll see the bricks have warped a little over their 60 years of existence. Because they're small they can still be used, whereas larger bricks generally can't.

To have it fit in with the Esso service station, a number of things needed to be different from standard. The door is white instead of red, as are the little side windows. Those windows are in ABS plastic (I only had one available in cellulose acetate) and have discoloured over time. The finishing touch is the plate trimmed in red, which I was lucky to have to spare from a lot of those plates I once found. 

Here is the garage in place next to the Esso service station. It makes a very nice match, even though some parts have discoloured differently. And the combination is a tad too wide to fit on the town plans, either the older one shown here or the newer one.

There is now space to park both the tank truck and the barrel truck that were made to go with the service station. A second barrel truck and trailer drives by with its load, while a tow truck pulls a Beetle that's had quite an accident.