Station Structures

Another job that needed doing with the Cartel layout before the ever so wanted ballasting was creating a couple more low relief structures for the 'platform' side of the fork. One of these being a simple weighbridge/yard office.

I'd started scratchbuilding with Wills brick sheet but I just couldn't get the look I was after, even at this early stage it felt 'off' somehow. I was also getting a little frustrated with the material itself, compared to normal, the plastic itself felt tougher to cut through, yet was snapping in a brittle way with not too much pressure from the knife. All three walls of the box above needed remaking a couple of times due to this.

For the sake of balance though, I genuinely can't remember when I picked up this particular batch of the brick sheet, it could be a case of it having been stored improperly at some point. Certainly it's the first time I've ever encountered this with the Wills stuff.

And so, it was a case of 'kitbash to the rescue' in the form of the Wills Weighbridge Hut kit. Very much taking the Chris Ford approach here to detailing to hide the origins a bit: extra bars on the window, a suggested floor on the inside of the door, a door handle from a track pin head, and finally modifying the door into a slightly open position to imply some sort of life.

The rear wall piece of the original kit was fashioned into two new end walls, wanting a different roof profile to that of the supplied gable ends from the kit.

And for comparison, the new bash with the abandoned scratchbuild, already looking much better dimensionally!

The roof proved a little tricky, wanting all the sides to meet up at a central apex, but cutting the angles on the longest side first and then using this as a guide for the two smaller pieces made the task much easier. Strips of ordinary printer paper soaked in solvent help disguise any dodgy roof joins nicely.

From there it was a case of raiding the Wills building details pack for extra brickwork, gutters and bargeboards to help alter the rather flat faces of the structure. I've got to that stage where I now find it far easier to make downpipes out of 1mm plastic rod than bash pre-made ones. Granted, the above isn't the best example, but painting/weathering does a lot to hide the imperfections.

And once again, as a fun comparison, the heavily bashed low relief version next to the lightly bashed version of the same kit seen back in September of last year.

And finally, after painting and weathering and sitting in situ.

A very pleasing result, especially after the false starts. Sometimes, the simpler solution is the correct one.

The Old Retainer

My statistics page tells me that this is the 100th post to this blog! Hooray!

We're slowly getting there with the scenics for the Cartel Challenge layout, though at times it is a bit of puzzle. Logically, I need to work from the back to the front, but there are certain items I can't start on without finishing others first. Case in point, a retaining wall needed along the front of the layout.

I really want to try getting the ballast down amongst the track soon before the really cold weather arrives and slows down drying times drastically, but I can't until I had this 'edge' added to stop the glue and stones escaping.

This wasn't what I was originally planning for this wall though. A couple of months back Micro Model Railway Dispatch editor Ian Holmes talked about how they were using a Chooch Enterprises embossed sheeting to infill the rails on their challenge layout...

It got me interested as a means of speeding up the process of layout building, and a quick search showed that not only were their products available in the UK, but that they produced a wooden retaining wall in the style that I wanted for this scene.

A sheet was duly ordered, but upon arrival it seemed to me as if the planking was a little too small, certainly one of those cases were a product being labelled OO/HO can come back to bite you! So instead a pleasant afternoon was spent making my own.

Nothing particularly remarkable here: Two sheets of 40thou plasticard glued back to back, scribed at 4mm intervals to represent foot wide planks, scratched multiple times lengthways with the tip of a sharp knife to get a wood grain effect.

Installed on the layout, a few offcuts of 80x188thou strip were similarly scratched and added to create upright stanchions. Perhaps I've gone too far in the other direction and made the planking a little too wide. Certainly when it next appears there'll be a few more stanchions added, but of course it was far easier to add to few and more later than try to remove them at a later date.

And after all that work I quickly decided to check a photograph of the prototype this is based on.

The memory cheats.

The real thing had upright planking on the wall with horizontal bracing!

I've put too much work into this to want to change it, and in all honesty, this is very much a caricature, so it does work in this context. It's hardly a make or brake detail.