Small Downtown Buildings For Your Layout

Just thought for Friday I’d give you some ideas for downtown structures for your model railroad, all buildings still exist as of 2009. Take a close look at the pipes, vents, boarded up windows, painted signs and unique architectural detail that would make a striking model in any era.

Here’s an example of a poorly modernized storefront in Crockett, Calif. The freight door has destroyed a more formal entrance and bricked up the remaining space. Not beautiful, but realistic.

Here’s a more dilapidated I.O.O.F hall in Crockett, note the boarded up blanked windows along the side.

Here’s the main downtown portion of Crockett, a classic little downtown that’s very modelgenic.

Here’s some 1880’s era victorian storefronts in Oakland, Calif.

Another view in the same location..

Here’s an interesting Chinese style structure just a few blocks away.

Here’s a ceramic tiled Art Deco storefront from the 1920’s. What an amazing building it would make on your layout if you could figure out how to scratchbuild it.

Here’s a classic Brick hotel that was built circa 1915. The painted sign and the neon sign below are nice touches.

The C&H Sugar Plant at Crockett, Calif.

Crockett is a very rare town for the West Coast. It’s a very gritty unincorporated blue collar town nestled beneath the massive pair of bridges that carry Highway 80 over the Carquinez Strait. The 3,200 souls that live in the town enjoy impressive views from impressively old victorian-era structures that climb their way up the very steep hillside. Each building is nicely weathered from the various airborne particles from the refineries and the plant itself, it’s a very modelgenic town to say the very least.

The Plant is really quite impressive and like no other (surviving and operating) industry in Northern California, a classic multi-story brick edifice that would be more at home in the hills of Pennslyvania. The amazing thing is that over the last century, the plant has been extensively modernized, but overall still looks remarkably original.

As far as one can infer, bulk cargo ships convey their loads of raw sugar into the plant for processing into a variety of products and leave the plant in Insulated boxcars (in sacks) and as molasses or sugar slurry in tank cars. They might also use airslide covered hoppers but I didn’t see very many of them or a means by which you can load them.

On to the photos!

Overall View.

Let’s Build the Ashford Tower!

It’s about time for another structure article. Therefore, I’ll be building the Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburgh’s “Ashford Tower” that’s offered by the great, but not well known manufacture known as Railway Design Associates. Their excellent structures are very similar in construction and molding quality to the popular DPM kits, and their kits have plenty of realistic character without looking like a characture. I bought my tower kit off of eBay directly from their online store for $20.00 and free shipping.

The kit itself is really quite nice and comes with plenty of extra details, obviously from other kits they offer. For any model railroader, this is a huge benefit to get so many neat detail parts in with your kit in addition to your building kit. It definately is an accurate kit with sharp details and some really beautiful windows, including the unique oval windows on the top of the first floor. They even captured the unusually thick 22″ concrete walls of the prototype!

Construction is pretty straight forward, like a DPM kit you must first file down the walls so that they’re square where necessary, then paint and glue it together. For paint I used Floquil “rattle-cans” in Tuscan Red for the base color for the roof (*we’ll weather and fade it out later.) and for the concrete I used rustoleum textured concrete paint for it’s excellent realistic color and somewhat rough finish.

For this kit, I wanted to really detail it since all the windows would probably be open and clean. I went about scratchbuilding a varnished wood floor and scratchbuilt the electro-mechanical interlocking machine found in many towers from the 1920’s.

The long wooden cabinet houses the electo-mechanical interlocking device, but that balsa-wood floor simply won’t do. I took thin basswood sheet and cut it into scale planks with kitchen scissors. I then varnished it with a mix of craft paint and acrylic gloss medium. I typically don’t gloss anything I model, but I felt the interior of this building would benefit from it once it’s illuminated with bulbs.

There’s the floor test fit into the building, I still need to paint the window detail on the inside of the kit.

The interior was then detailed after the varnish dried with a variety of detail parts I had on hand. The guy in green is a Micro Machines figure, perfect HO scale by the way.

The Interior was then test fit..

Stay tuned for part 2 which includes the final details and weathering.

Part 3: Atlas Wooden Turntable Goes Steel

To follow this project from the beginning, check out part one and look at part 2 with interest and make sure you’re all up to speed, because here’s where it gets complicated.

Okay, since the design of this turntable is essentially a pin-connected steel truss bridge lying in a concrete pit. So now it’s time to break out a package or two of Central Valley’s bridge parts. To make the bridge, you need to assemble 4 identical truss bridge pieces. A smart idea would be to make a wooden jig and assemble the pieces accordingly. I need to draw up some scale plans for the truss spans, I’ll post them in a while. It isn’t too difficult to take the photographs found in the first article and modify or compress them to fit on our atlas turntable.

the photos above shows how the Central Valley bridge pieces connect to the I beams attached to the main frame in the last article.

Basically, each truss piece should attach to the I beams, then you connect each truss span together with bar-and-pin fittings from the top of each truss span. The first truss span seen in the photo below was a prototype. Each girder was cut with a razor saw, and fitted together with Walther’s goo. The rivet plates were made from 0.003″ brass, the rivets made from gently tapping the point of a screw into the brass in the correct rivet pattern, pretty tedious work that doesn’t make that great of an effect. I might go with styrene in the next version with archer rivet decals handling the rivet details.

Next, we’ll tackle how to distribute weight on the turntable, work on the pit rails and give it a rotation test.

The AMTRAK depot at Emeryville, Calif.

The depot is very well designed and a model of what a modern depot should be. Plenty of room for the platform for baggage and passengers, and plenty of AMTRAK employees around to help. The walkway over the tracks is a great place to watch trains go by.

The Fruitvale Avenue Railroad Bridge of Alameda, Calif.

The Fruitvale Avenue Railroad Bridge was built in 1951 by the Army Corps of Engineers, you can learn the entire history of the bridge, and also learn some fascinating information about how the bridge works and the unorthodox way it recieves electric power to operate. In addition to the views of the bridge I took a few months ago from the Alameda side of the bridge, check out these 3 aerial views, presumably taken by helicopter.

This bridge replaced the much older swing span that originally carried SP Interurban Electrics across the channel, as seen in this photo from my personal archive:

This is an SP Interurban Electric Crossing Fruitvale Avenue Bridge towards Alameda in 1935

This Overall view is looking south-east towards the Oakland Airport and San Leandro. The adjacent Miller-Sweeny bascule-lift bridge (built 1971) carries automobile traffic on Fruitvale Avenue.

Looking up to see the 175 foot high lift towers…

Sitting at 65 feet the span is left open, and the massive counterweight also sits in position midway up the tower, and slides up or down to counter the weight of the span when raised or lowered.

The control tower that operates the Miller-Sweeny bridge also controls the Railroad Lift bridge.

A closeup shot of the far tower on the Oakland side.

The bridge never saw Interurban Electric traffic (that having been removed in 1937-1941) However it did see the occasional steam locomotive and 50 years of diesels, from 1951-2001. The Southern Pacific crossed on this bridge into Alameda to interchange with the Alameda Belt Line, and serve a handful of industries on the south side of Park Street. The Alameda Belt line was gone by 1998, when traffic at the naval base ended in the early 1990’s and the Del Monte Packing house closed its doors. In later years the Union Pacific handled the dwindling amount of traffic until the rails were pulled up on either side of the bridge sometime early in the 2000’s.

Painting the G scale Engine House

Now that almost everything is attached and glued together, it’s time to seal it with a layer of primer and begin the final process of painting and adding door hardware. The process was pretty straighforward and can be done a number of ways. We choose the most professional way, using a compressed air sprayer with lightly thinned Benjamin Moore outdoor flat house paint. Next we went in and painted the roof with brushes and the white trim with smaller brushes.

About 3 coats of primer had the wood sufficently sealed to be left outside on the garden railroad.

2 coats of Spanish red had the engine house looking really nice.

The Roof was painted carefully with flat brushes in a nice dark brown.

White trim adds a touch of class and sharpens the overall look of the building.

In our final installment, we’ll add the doors and place it on the layout.

Adding a Roof to our G scale Engine House

So now that the walls have been built, it’s time to add a roof to the frame we built in the first installment. We’re using 3/8″ plywood for the roof, held with Titebond and finishing nails.

Once both sides have been glued on, there will be a gap in the center of the building, this is on purpose as we’ll be adding a clerestory roof to this building as seen in the cover photo.

Fill in the cap of the roof with small lumber cut to fit, filled with wood filler and sanded flush.

Now that the roof cap has been built on BOTH ends with a 1/4″ interior overhang in the clerestory, it’s time to actually build the clerestory.

Figure out the pitch (angle) of the roof and cut two end pieces to match them, then cut the sides and bevel the bottom edge to match the slope of the roof.

Now attach the two roof boards you cut and beveled the interior edge to the clerestory roof frame. but we’re not done yet, the final step can be done in a number of ways.

To prevent direct water/snow contact you need to cap the roof to prevent the building from water leakage. You can go classic and shingle the roof and use split shingles to cap the roof. You can roll tar-paper over the top of the roof. You could do the entire roof in scale corrugated metal and cap the roof with some copper, or you could carefully cut a piece of 1X1″ lumber into an “L” shape and mount it on the roof like we have here.

Stay tuned for priming, painting and the addition of hardware.

Let’s Build A G Scale Engine House & Carbarn

This remarkably beautiful structure could be your next G scale structure. A building like this could easily be a car barn or engine house depending on the type of details you’d want to add to the basic structure.

This particular engine house is built to last, utilizing high quality lumber and plenty of titebond, screws and nails to keep it together for years to come. It also has recieved two layers of primer and 3 layers of state-of-the art housepaint. (We’ll discuss paint later).

Our building here is sparsely detailed to allow the future owner to detail it to fit his needs. With the addition of normal sized doors and windows along the side it could look even more impressive. Spend some time adding some board-and-batten woodwork, and some victorian architectural detail and you could really make it stand out. Add some G scale smoke jacks and rigging wire and you’d have a top-notch engine house.

Based off of plans found at a train show, I modified the drawings to fit the space I had, which was roughly 2X4 feet. The building itself is 19 5/8ths inches wide and 44″ long, with an inch roof overhang all around the structure for drainage and improved looks.

So Follow along in the next couple of posts as we build this fantastic engine house!

First we cut the front & rear walls out of 1/2″ plywood with a Jigsaw. The 2″ round hole in the front was cut with a drillbit hole attachment.

Next we cut the walls from more 1/2″ plywood and NOTCHED the top of the board to match the slope of the roof, which is crucial.

Make sure to cut the holes for the building out carefully, as you’ll need to use them for snug-fitting doors for all three stalls. We cut the 1/2″ thick pieces in half and filled and sanded them smooth.

Next we cut the roof framing from recycled 1/2″ lumber and notched the roof peaks in a special fashion, as seen below, for extra strength.

Follow the arrow to the roof brace mounted about an inch below the roof line, so the roof frame, when lowered into place, will sit flush against the beveled side walls for a seamless fit.

IF you want one just like this, we have decided to offer it to “Interacting with Miniature Railroading” readers for just $450 plus shipping.

Stay Tuned For Part Two!

Atlas Turntable Kitbash- From Wooden Wonder to SP Common Standard.

The Atlas turntable has been a staple of model railroading for more than 40 years, and still sells well today. However despite it being one of the most mechanically well-designed turntables in existance, it is a model of a very unusual prototype. Wooden plank turntables did and still do exist today. The wooden plank turntabe was used in the late 1800’s for street railways, cable car operations and small industrial railroads to not only provide a means to rotate motive power but also to serve as an accessible pedestrian or vehicular thoroughfare when not in use. It also would have been installed in areas where a turntable pit would have been dangerous or not feasibly built. Despite these advantages, they were expensive to maintain and all but a very select few survive today. Most, if not all of them were “armstrong” turntables in which an operator had to push on the piece of equipment to get it to rotate. Other examples of armstrong turntables include “gallows” style turntables and very early cast-iron turntables, all dating from the beginning of railroading forward.

Due to the fact that the wooden plank turntable is an extremely rare type of turntable, it shouldn’t be on as many layouts as you see them on. The benefit of the Atlas model is that you don’t have to modify your benchwork in any way to use the turntable, which is a major plus compared to nearly any other model on the market.

In this next series of articles I aim to get a solid, non-rotating turntable while achieving the detail of a Southern Pacific Common Standard 100′ turntable, albeit selectively compressed. It won’t be an easy project, but it’ll reward you with an excellent looking and operating piece of equipment that’ll always work well.

The Concept

The Idea is to cover the rotating top of the turntable, to legnthen it to the outer edges of the device and create a highly detailed steel turntable structure to be visually appealing and eyecatching.

From a mechanical standpoint, It’ll have wires soldered to the rails on the deck that’ll be fed up through a tube to the rails at track level. The whole turntable will swivel from this central tube which is glued to the former top of the turntable.

A new concrete pit will be scratchbuild out of acrylic sheet and painted. Pit rails will be installed to guide the outrigger wheels on either end of the bridge.

The extended edges will allow a Bachmann Spectrum 2-8-0 (with Vandy Tender) to turn itself around, which was impossible before the modification. This opens up the turntable to medium sized motive power and it can also turn an SD-45T-2 with ease as well.

The first step was proving my concept before jumping head first into a complex project, so I cut a large doughnut shape from grocery bag paper electrical tape. Testing out the false bottom concept was a success, it turns fine as long as there’s clearance over the former wooden top of the turntable.

Follow along as we venture into the complex world of constructing a turntable from wood, brass, styrene and acrylic sheet.

Here’s a sneak peek…