February - April, 2002
We finished the basic layout during the Christmas
break, so Josh now had a fully functional N-scale
layout he could run while I worked on adding buildings and some
other structures to the layout. We decided I would build the
buildings and other structures at my house during my spare time
because this is pretty tedious work and not really suited for the
attention span of an 8 year old.
Josh and I talked a
little about what kind of buildings he wanted for the layout but the
only thing he insisted on was a train station. This made sense
because his rolling stock included a set of 5 passenger cars and
according to Josh, "how are the people ever going to get on and
off the train if there's no train station".
Other
than the train station, he wasn't sure what kind of
buildings he
wanted. We spent a little time on the internet looking at
buildings, but he soon got bored with that activity, so I decided to
just order the Town and Factory Building
Set from Woodland
Scenics. The set contains 13 buildings and over 70 accessories
and was designed especially for the Scenic Ridge layout. And the
cost of the kit is less than one-third of the cost of buying the
buildings separately.
In addition to the Town and Factory
Building Set, we also purchased a train station and a water
tank (got to have water to make steam) . We found both of these
items by searching the internet. The train station Josh liked
the best was the Atlas Railroad
Company's Passenger Station Kit (#2841). The station kit
came with a luggage cart with baggage and freight, a hand truck ,and a
freight scale. For the water tank, Josh picked the one made by Demi
Train (#236-2000).
While I was waiting for the
building kits to arrive, I decided it might be a good idea to learn a
little about the techniques used to build model structures. The only models I
had ever built were model cars way back in junior high school and I didn't
think that experience would be very useful in this endeavor. So,
I began searching around on the internet to see what information I
could find. Turns out, there was a lot. I found Basics of Building Plastic Structures
and Structures
to be particularly useful.
After obtaining enough information to be dangerous, I
gathered or purchased the tools and supplies I would need to begin
building the struct- ures. The tools and supplies I had on hand
were:
wsandpaper
wneedle nose pliers
wExacto knife
wscissors
wlighted magnifying
glass
Tools and supplies I had to purchase were:
wsprue cutter
wsmall flat file
wassortment of small paintbrushes
wTenax 7R Plastic Welder Cement
wBadger model 250 airbrush
wMODELflex™ paints in the
following railroad colors
sEngine Black
sReefer White
sDark Tuscan Oxide
Red
sLight Tuscan Oxide
Red
sGrimy Black
sConcrete Gray
Within
a week or so I had all of the building kits, tools, and
supplies. Time to start building. I decided to start with
the water tank because it appeared to have the simplest color
scheme. It took two evenings, working about 3 hours each evening
to complete the water tank. This turned out to be about the
average time to complete each structure. Working at this pace,
it took me about 6 weeks to complete all 15 structures.
I
didn't have any major problems with the water tank, but I
discovered right away that the lighted magnifying glass was going to
be an essential tool. Fifty- year-old+ eyesight is no match for
n-scale!
Learning to
use the airbrush was a snap. The Badger model 250
does not have a lot of bells and whistles and so it is very simple to
use. To contain the over spray I made a simple backdrop of
newspaper. There is really not much over spray, at least not
compared to rattle-cans, so this set up worked well.
To
simulate weathering I purchased one of the Weather Systemtm
kits from
Hobbytools.
The weathering kit I bought contained four small boxes (1/2 ounce
each) of
weathering powders - light rust, medium rust, dark rust, and
soot. Several other powder colors are available. The
powders are made from real rust and other weathering agents that have
been milled to a particle size over 100 times finer than
chalk. Unless you have several hundred buildings to weather,
don't buy anything but the small boxes. This stuff goes a long,
long way. I simply applied the powders with a small, stiff paint
brush until I got the effect I was looking for. If you mess up,
it can be washed off.
After I completed the water tank
I felt confident to tackle a
building. I choose the train station as my first
building. The train station was the only building out of
the 15 I was building that didn't have to be painted. The
out-of-the box color scheme (as shown in the above photo) wasn't bad,
but it had a "plastic" look that I didn't find very
attractive, so I decided to paint it.
The
station was a good choice for my first building. Although it
wasn't hard to build, there were lots of parts which gave me a chance
to practice using the airbrush, applying plastic cement, and hand
painting. All in all, I think it came out pretty well for my
first attempt. The station came with the scale, baggage, and
baggage cart shown above, but I added all the people, which were
purchased separately.
While building the train
station, I discovered that the type of
sprue cutters I bought did not work very well. The one I bought
operates kind of like a short-bladed pair of scissors and tends to
slip on the plastic rather than cut it clean. If you buy a sprue
cutter make sure you get the "nipper" type, like those made by PBL
(see photo). I didn't want to buy another pair of cutters, so
for the remainder of the buildings I used a pair of toenail clippers
(big nail clippers) I had laying around the house and they work great.
The
remaining 13 buildings were all made by Design
Preservation Models, so the assembly process was essentially the
same for all of them. The general procedure I followed was:
3With
airbrush, paint roof grimy black (both sides)
3Assemble building
using Tenax 7R plastic welder cement
3With airbrush,
paint building desired color
3Cement roof in
place (strengthens building for handling)
3Apply brick
mortar detail (thinned paint, usually white)
3Hand paint
windows, doors, columns, and other details
3Cement window
acetate in place
3Apply sign boards
and other decals
3Apply weathering
3Insert black card
stock diagonally inside building
I didn't take photos
of each completed building, but here are a couple of examples:
After
completing the buildings, I began work on the 70 or so accessories
(barrels, skids, benches, street lights, etc.) that were included in
the Town and Factory Building
Set. All of these accessories were cast in "white
metal". I'm not sure what "white metal" is but
it's similar to the metal used for tire weights. The extraneous
metal left from the casting process had to be removed from each
individual piece. The best tool I found to remove the metal
casting material was a Dremmel cut-off wheel, but I also used a file
and an Exacto knife on several occasions. All-in-all it took
several hours to prepare the parts for painting -- very tedious work!
In
order to paint these tiny pieces, I glued them to a 2' long
piece of metal bar using gap-filling super glue. This worked great and allowed me to paint
an entire piece (except the bottom) at one time.
The pieces that were all one color were quick and easy to paint.
The pieces that were more than one color, like the street lights were
more tedious and I had to use the lighted magnifying glass and a very
small paint brush to paint the details.
To simulate
weathering, I applied rust powder from the
Weather Systemtm
to several of the pieces, especially the propane tanks, scrap
metal piles, and barrels.
After all the building were complete, all that remained was to
arrange them in the layout. The Town and Factory Building
Set comes with a template showing the locations for the
buildings in the Scenic Ridge layout. However, I didn't think
the placement of the building fit our layout very well, so I made a
couple of templates of the two building sites in the layout and used
these to play with the building placement until it "looked
right".
Some of the things I considered in placing
the buildings were decal placement and type of business. If a
building had a nifty billboard on the side, I didn't want it hidden by
an adjacent building. I also tried to group the building by type
of business - the theater, hotel, and pharmacy were placed together in
the "better" part of town, while the auto store, bar, and
pawn shop where located down towards the "seedier" part
of town. You wouldn't want your hotel guests getting hassled by
the local drunks and other riffraff!
Once we had the
placement sorted out, we used a two-part epoxy to
glue the
buildings in place. This photo shows the building placement
in the layout site for the town.
The
placement of the factory and the train station was an easy
decision. The station had to be located adjacent to the
tracks and the factory was placed in the remaining space.
After the buildings were glued in place, we added ground cover (grass,
dirt, gravel, etc.) and landscaping (trees, shrubs) to the remainder
of the building layout sites. To complete the layout we added people, vehicles,
street lights, and other detail items.
For that
"finishing touch", Josh's mother made a skirt to go around the bottom of the layout
bench from material she bought, as shown in the
photo at the top of this page. She sewed
pleats in the material and hemmed it to length, then attached it to
layout bench with strips of Velcro. This not only dressed up the
table, it made a convenient place to store train supplies and other
stuff out of site.
Josh now had a fully detailed n-scale layout that he (and occasionally
me) could enjoy for years to come. We may add a few bells and
whistles from time to time and if we do, I'll chronicle those
activities in future episodes.
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