Building the car barn :: 3

Progress on several fronts – notably the roof and the sand house.

Progress has been stymied by difficulties sourcing some essential parts but I continue to pick away at my model of the car barn used by the Niagara St. Catharines & Toronto Railway to service its freight motors.

Since my last update (in late November), I’ve built the roof over the western extension, including the skylights, and I’ve roughed in more of the features on the roof of the main structure. The western extension also featured a number of wire supports mounted on the walls, and I’ve added those. The supports are tied into brass poles mounted inside the structure: with luck, they’ll resist the tension of the overhead cross spans they’ll eventually hold.

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The most notable bit of progress, though, is the sand house:

A signature structure, well underway.

The sand house is a signature structure for this scene. I built the walls from individual lengths of strip wood, stained before assembly. Windows and doors are also built up from individual pieces.

The structure has a fair amount of corrugated sheathing and for this I cut individual pieces, which I glued to sheet styrene bases. I made sign (“NO parking / buses only”) on my computer and affixed it to a piece of thin styrene sheet with double-sided tape.

This building still needs details, including glass in the windows and a sand pile inside, but already it has changed the look of the scene – for the better.

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I’ve also started on overhead wire. I have permanently installed the 15 line poles in this scene, and started to fabricate bracket arms on those poles that require them. Finally, I’ve fabricated and installed troughs in the ceiling of the car barn to guide trolley poles inside the structure.

Wire troughs as seen through the openings for skylights in the main structure. I’ll paint them black.

I’m pretty pleased with how this scene is coming together and I’m keen to get started on overhead wiring.