Scratchbuilding - Warehouse

Scratch Building a Warehouse

 

There was an odd shaped space on the layout that we had not decided what to do with so I scratch built this warehouse using evergreen styrene strips and sheets.  Once we figured out the basic shape we looked at the function the structure would serve.  We decided that a warehouse made sense for this area but, as of now, have not decided the specific materials the warehouse handles. The Railroad will be servicing the facility from the back side  supplying boxcars for unloading.   We have saved space at the end of the building to serve as a parking lot or trailer storage.while actual tractor trailer loading would be on the side of the warehouse not modeled.

Because the building is against the backdrop and will have to almost never be moved, I decided to do a very minimal amount of framing, with full sheets of styrene for the walls.  For the preformed concrete style of construction, I cut 15' x 15' scale squares of styrene sheet and started adding them to the initial layer of styrene that was added to the wall.  After adding the concrete blocks and trim it was ready for sheet styrene for the roof and then get to a paint booth.

 

This is the new warehouse with some flats in the background to help fill in the scene.  The track in the front of the scene will serve a lumber distributor and another industry yet to be named.

The warehouse will eventually have a billboard on the top of it similar to the one that is currently holding its place.  Also the building needs finished of with roof details, but am having a rough time finding a good source of roof details in N-Scale.

Weathered Locomotives

It has been a busy week, weathering 5 Locomotives.

After taking apart the locomotives, I weathered these using primarily an airbrush with acrylic paints.  After I was done with the airbrush, I came back in and touched up things with weathering chalk.


This is a Kato SD7 Custom weathered Southern Pacific #1442.

This is a Kato SD45 Custom Painted and weathered for St. Louis and San Francisco #925

This is a Atlas GP40-2 Custom Weathered Norfolk Southern #3013

 This is a Atlas B30-7 Custom Weathered St. Louis and San Francisco #864

 This is a Kato SD45 Custom weathered Chicago and Northwestern #6527

Weathered Rolling Stock

 Ive been spending a little bit of time bent of the workbench with a paintbrush, airbrush, toothpick, microbrush, .... in hand working on weathering some rolling stock and locomotives.  Here are some pictures of a couple of the rolling stock completed.

This first set of four pictures is the finished product from a earlier post. It is a Koppers Plastics covered hopper by Bachmann.  I attempted to make it a very rust riddled car with most of the hatches having been replaced at some point in its duty.  Most of the weathering was done with oil paints and chalk.

These three pictures are of a Micro-Trains Grand Trunk Covered hopper in which I have attempted to create the look of rust forming where the hopper has been badly scratched by something and not repainted, allowing rust to form on the bare metal.  A couple of the roof hatches have also been modeled to represent being replaced.  On this model I used a mix of acrylic paints, oil paints and chalk.

Jefferson City Yard

I have been spending a lot of time with a soldering iron in hand building turnouts and laying the track to finish our Jefferson City Yard.

This morning I added the last two pieces of track for the yard!  the track work in the yard is complete.  Spent part of the day running locos with strings of cars over areas that have power already and cleaned up an difficult spots.  Now just a whole lot of track feeders, a couple dozen Tortoise switch machine installs, the yard diagram featuring manual throws for the Tortoises for more efficient switching, more ties added, ballasting..... at least as of right now I have the mainline and 3 yard tracks that I can use to entertain myself.

Also I started on the yard layout board, diagram, switch controls, today.  I am building it on a 1/8" x 24" x 8" piece of plastic.  The plastic had been purchased awhile ago for cnc milling and it was still around so...  

I printed out the design for it in full scale across three sheets of paper and then worked from that adding artist tape to the plastic where the track lines would be.  The plastic is naturally white, somewhat translucent, so once the track marks were down with artist tape it got a layer of black paint, tape was pulled, and then a couple coats of polycrylic to protect the paint from being torn up as easily.
All spots that represent a turnout have been drilled out to accept mini DPDT switches and then 3mm bipolar Red/Green LEDS have been added just beyond the switch to indicate which way the switch is aligned.  The is a whole lot of wiring to go on this project and its going to be a little bit of a nightmare.  Each DPDT switch will have 12v input and then have 12v output to the Tortoise, and also have to go through a 380ohm 1/4w resister to provide power for the LED indicator.  I've decided on fabricating resistor circuit board to help clean up the wiring a little, but as you can imagine, its a whole lot more soldering coming my way.