Post #25

 It's been over a month but the wheels have still been rolling, The track plan has been locked in now and its just a matter of getting down and installing the track. The easy bit is laying the flex track and then comes the hard bit of making the hand laid section. It's been well over 40+ years since I have hand laid my last track.

I'll come back and cover the track laying in another post. I actually got around to ordering some printed circuit sleepers for the track and points ( or ties and turnouts) but when laid for the first point I found that the sleeper thickness was slightly different in the two products. So I said to myself take a deep breath and move onto something else for a while.

So I looked for another time waster and I have quite a few plastic building kits to be assembled. Up one end of the board I have laid in a siding that can be served by both heavy rail and traction as there will be overhead to it. 

 The building is a Walthers kit as per photo. The box was fairly heavy and after opening there were many bags of various colour of plastic sprues. Your first thought is wow how long is this all going to take to put together.

It was just a matter of getting the instructions and start putting it all together. It is not a hard structure to make, just a lot of repetitive actions to do especially the windows. Part of the effort goes into removing the items from the sprues.

I decided the building would have a weathered, slightly run down appearance as opposed to the bright shiny new look out of the box. The first task was to locate the four sides and paint them with Tamiya Flat Earth colour. This immediately toned down the plastic red to a more real looking brownish brick colour. Then to make them stand out more all the window sills were then painted with Tamiya Desert Yellow. Both of these colours like bright and clean but them comes the weathering colour which is Tamiya Khaki Drab which is then diluted well down with some Isopryl Alcohol. This works a treat and work up from very diluted to more heavy ratio where a stronger aged appearance is required. You can see as soon as it is painted over the sills, they take on a weathered appearance. You can see the immediate change in the colour of the painted area in the photo below.

Another bonus of the building is that it will hold two point motors for adjacent trackage, sometimes it is easier to have top motored point motors.

The kit is very well produced for an injection plastic model, all parts fit as they should with out any filing, this compared with a few resin cottage industry buildings in the past that require much filing to fit. I would do an hour or so work each day on the building. There is no rush to finish and was easier to target a task for the day such as assemble the docks or do work on the windows.

 The roofs over the dock and rail dock were glued into place and then painted with Tamiya light grey. I then added some rust streaks on the roof. Some rust coloured chalk was scraped onto some wet Isopryl alcohol and let to dry. Like I said this building is old and decrepit. Side steps and railings were added. The roof had four skylights on it and were added. The plastic supplied for the roof was just a flat black piece so I added masking tape over it to add some texture and this was an improvement. Again to the rescue Tamiya flat black added to the roof and weathered up with the Tamiya Khaki drab. The roof has to remain removable so to allow access to the point motors.

 The next big job was to weather the windows and insert into the building. I wired all the windows together and then dunked them into the usual brown goopy mixture to make the job quicker. Once dry then came the insertion process. I still had the roof off at this stage to make it easier. It was then just a matter of sitting down at the desk and gluing them all in. And after they were in then came the glazing. So now the building is basically done, I may insert some floors into it unless the 'weathering' over the windows doesn't block out the view to the inside.

 So the building is basically finished, I might add some other details such as water down pipes and a few stickers. There are some that came with the kit. So this distraction from the track laying has been done. I basically wanted to refresh my ability to construct and weather up a building. And when the time is ready it will be secured down to the baseboard and this will allow the scenery to flow around the outside or a place for the weeds to take hold!