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Wooden Buildings

Page history last edited by Ian Stock 15 years ago

Ian Stock


The finished building placed in position at Queen's Forest Road. It still needs to be properly bedded into a levelled platform. Enamel adverts etc. - and some natural weathering - still to come...

 

After the trains themselves, the architecture of a railway is perhaps its most noticeable feature, and one which plays the major part in determining the atmosphere of a particular place and time. Therefore I believe that it is essential to get this right in order to create a convincing overall effect, but in fact, this aspect of garden railways often appears neglected – perhaps because of the difficulty of creating large scale buildings that don’t look like Wendy houses and that, given the time taken to produce them, will also withstand the rigours of an outdoor existence. There is also the difficulty that full-size buildings in our scales tend to be very large.

 

I am gradually developing techniques that I hope will address some of these issues. One mental hurdle that I eventually crossed was to accept that it is not possible to create realistic buildings that will live outdoors permanently with no maintenance at all – we do not expect that of the prototype after all!

 

I have concluded that masonry and stone buildings are perhaps the hardest to get ‘right’ – the manipulation of the materials required is not easy – frequently messy, if not downright hazardous, while to my eyes, the synthetic substitutes just don’t really do the job.  I am currently pondering techniques for easing working in real stone, but they are yet not advanced.

 

In the meantime, I have decided to work in wood, which was the medium adopted by many real NG railways, after all, for cheapness. It is easier to achieve a realistic finish to the building in wood. This is also a relatively quick process, the building featured here taking just a couple of weeks of on-off work to complete. I think that the techniques owe more to patience than complexity.

 

I have also chosen to feature this building as it perhaps addresses some of the issues surrounding the relationship between prototype structures and the models we might create of them. Dduallt is the location of the famous spiral on the Ffestiniog Railway, but it was, of course, a wayside station long before that, located just to the south of the original Moelwyn Tunnel. The original had a rather attractive timber-built structure that was demolished some time before the station finally closed in 1939. It is perhaps not surprising, given the station’s remote location, that few pictures exist of it – which posed both a dilemma and an opportunity in recreating my ‘take’ on it.

 

Drawings were made using the few photographs available, taking approximate dimensions such as door heights as a guide. Note was taken of the changes made to the building when the original open shelter was replaced by enclosed rooms, and the building was extended. It was the latter incarnation that I wanted. Where there was no information available, I resorted to extrapolating from the contemporaneous wooden building at Tan-y-Bwlch, which I had already photographed and modelled, and which appears to have some constructional and component similarities. I omitted the rear extension to the building, which is almost indiscernible – conveniently, I had no room for it in the intended location, anyway!

 

The basic structure is from 12mm exterior grade plywood – a simple box, with window apertures cut using a power jigsaw – and glued/screwed together, using weatherproof pva and countersunk brass screws. Extreme precision in cutting/assembly is not normally essential at this stage.

 

The structure of the building is very basic; the slight warp is not intended, though, and you should not look at the off-square rear wall of the porch!

 

The exterior was faced with 1.5mm thick obechi sheet, cut to size, with the grain running vertically and with accurately-cut window and door apertures. It was bonded to the plywood with more pva, clamped until dry, effectively forming an additional ply layer. This of course covers up the raw ends of the basic plywood box. Doors utilise the plywood proper for their base to ensure waterproofing, with raised detail being added using 0.8mm obechi strip. Windows were glazed using 2mm picture glass cut to size and inserted in the apertures, being secured with epoxy. Window frames and glazing bars were built up on this from strip obechi and secured with more epoxy. Tight push-fits are achieved, which means that the glue does not have to do all the work of holding pieces in place, should it fail after time outdoors. The weather strips over the supposed plank-joints were added from more obechi strip, secured with pva. This process is used to build up the model bit by bit. The porch used the same techniques, just with thinner wood, round a birch ply core to reduce any risk of warping in unsupported obechi.

 

 

 

Awaiting painting.

 

The walls were painted before the roof was added:  all surfaces sanded down, windows masked out,

then a coat of Halfords’ grey spray primer, followed by two coats of magnolia masonry paint from a tester pot. The woodwork and ‘ironwork’ was painted later using Humbrol model paints. The colour scheme is not clear from the original photo’s, so I kept to the Tan-y-Bwlch colour scheme used on my previous model.

 

In the past, I have used 6mm exterior ply for the roof, but this tends to result in an over-thick structure. For this building, I have experimented with 1.5mm thick birch ply, treated inside with wood preservative. The roof itself is from Richard Stacey real slates – not cheap, but effective. While they do produce 1:19 scale slates, they are more expensive than the 1:12 equivalents as they are priced by the amount of cutting required, which is the same for either scale, but sold by quantity. I buy the cheaper ones, and find that I can scribe two joints into the width of the slates, thus using each slate sideways-on the represent three smaller 1:19 slates. The slates are secured using a generous coat of exterior grade silicone sealant, which also waterproofs the roof, and gives it rigidity. Before attaching the slates, brackets were added to the top surface from thin brass shim, to accommodate the guttering, and the strips along the lower edge to slope the first row of slates correctly were also added.

 

Ridge slates are from plastic angle, scribed and painted to match, which makes a weatherproof top join on the roof.

 

Smaller details can add a lot of character, but are often omitted due to supposed fragility. Barge boards were cut from yet more obechi, being shaped with a craft knife; finials are from obechi strip, the rounded parts being turned in my mini-drill, using needle files to do the shaping; the rest was whittled down with a craft knife. They were glued in place with pva and then pinned through into the plywood structure using Peco track pins, the pin heads being cut off. Door handles were turned up in a similar way.

 

Guttering is from Evergreen styrene tube cut lengthwise and glued into the brackets; downpipes are from uncut tube, the bends being achieved by gentle heating over a flame. The wrinkles that form during this can be filed flat to represent the rims on individual joins in the pipe. The downpipe was attached with brackets made from more brass shim, drilled and pinned through into the carcase.

 

The gas lamp was made from a butchered item from Miniature Scale Models, with a scratch-built soldered-brass bracket. The bracket acts as one pole for the electricity, while the horizontal tube accommodates a wire with the other. This support also extends well inside the building to add strength, being a push-fit into a tube fixed into the carcase. Other building wiring is pushed into place via another brass tube at the rear of the building.

 

 

The carcase was mounted on strips of aluminium under its lower edges, these fixed with more silicone, and painted black to represent the raised podium on which wooden buildings stand in order to keep the woodwork above the damp ground.

 

The chimney was made from a double-thickness of 12mm ply, glued and screwed together, with corner fins from strip wood added to retain the exterior-grade filler than was then used to represent the masonry. When ‘green', this was shaped and scribed and was later dry-brushed with brick-colour Humbrols. The pot is from a length of Evergreen tube, with Milliput moulded into shape on the outside. A small hole was drilled to permit rainwater to escape. The chimney was glued and screwed in place at the rear of the building. The building was finally secured in location using more silicone, which means it can be cut clear in future should the need arise.

 

The view most often seen of the original in the few photographs that exist.

 

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