Menards 279-8333 Cripple Creek General Store HO Scale

Vittles for your village: The HO gauge no. 279-8333 Cripple Creek General Store by Menards

If you get away from the urban areas and smaller cities, you’ll find America dotted with towns too small for a mega store like a Kroger or locally owned IGA or Piggly Wiggly grocery. Townsfolk are more likely to rely on a small shop that sells a little bit of everything - from food and stapes, to cloth, work gloves, and maybe even barbed wire!

Cripple Creek is growing, but the customers are more likely to need a 20-pound sack of flour, a case of nails, and some shotgun shells rather than a DVD rental! The Cripple Creek General Store fills those needs.

The Basics: The fully assembled and decorated structure has an old-school two-story wood design with a rusty steel roof. The building has a modest 6-3/8-inch by 4-1/8-inch footprint, and has a height of 5 inches. There is a main store with additions on each side. The base has a grassy area with a tree and another segment with a dirt surface and man on horseback. The model has exterior LED lighting above the main sign, and LEDs are placed beneath the porch roof.

The model requires a 4.5-volt power supply sold separately (Menards SKU nos. 279-4061/4361, 4062/4362, or 4050). Power may be applied through a power connection at the rear of the store, or a drop-down pigtail plug from beneath the building.

Why you need this: If your railroad models either a rural setting or pre-1930s railroading, this is a step back in time. The building re-creates the time when the store was small, the variety large, and the owners slept upstairs!

Arriving customers take two steps up onto the wooden plank porch. You can almost hear the floorboards creak! Four wooden poles secure the roof above. A sign advertising "Guns-Ammo-Grub" hangs down from above. A rancher on horseback is riding past, no doubt ready to tie-up to a post and stop for a little shopping.

Three figures in vintage attire populate the porch. Eight-pane windows bracket the see-through double-door entrance. Just to the left, there is a sign for Dad’s Root Beer, and a trashcan and a barrel complement the scene.

The second floor has three eight-pane windows with curtains and mounted in the center is a wooden sign reading Cripple Creek General Store.

An addition on the right has an eight-pane window on the side, and a tall smokestack atop the nicely weathered roof. Four guide wires to secure the stack in place! Out front, Jack the German shepherd is relaxing in the grass, beneath a shade