Kendall Tower

Kendall Tower was located just north of the Seeley Creek Bridge.  It controlled all movements through the yard and trains coming off the Erie at Elmira.  The tower was a prominent feature at the south end of Southport yard. It was located on a fill slope, and unfortunately on my layout, the rear of the tower is visible instead of the more ornamental front view.  The tower is a scratch build in any scale as nothing comes close to representing its Victorian era architecture.  I found plans for Kendall on the Elmira Branch Yahoo Group website.  When comparing the plans against the photos of the actual structure, they appear to be quite accurate.  

My version of Kendall began with the base structure using mat board as a sub structure and 1/32" scribed siding.  That was the easy part.  The structure has a significant amount of Victoria era detailing with lots of corbels and ogee moulding, a challenge in any scale but especially in S.  The above photo shows the front of the building with the upper level bay window.  In this view, the roof corbels can be seen.  They extend all around the upper part of the structure .  Mine were scratched from 1/16" basswood.  I used a pattern of the curve cut into a piece of styrene and used that as a guide to carve each corbel by hand.

The above photo shows all of the corbels installed and the second story walls painted a medium brown color prior to building the roof structure.  I cut the roof base from 1/32" thick model aircraft plywood. The notch is for the brick chimney that extends up the rear wall of the building.  You can also make out the small second story rear portico entry where the exterior stairs will eventually lead.  The windows are modified Tichy HO scale injection molded castings with some of the mullions removed.

This will certainly make an unusual and interesting structure on the layout.  Stay tuned for more photos of the roof and upper eave details.

Back to Working on the Seeley Creek Truss Bridge

After quite some time I returned to working on the bridge over Seeley Creek.  From my earlier post you may recall that the bridge floor system is made entirely of white Evergreen styrene.  This week I painted the floor system black and weathered it with Bragdon weathering powders, and I must admit that it looks rather striking. The photo shows it just before adding the bridge timbers.  I cut the bridge timbers from 5/32" x 5/32" basswood (10" square in S Scale)  the bridge ties were then stained in a solution of India ink and denatured alcohol to give them a nice weathered look.

Next the ties were glued to the bridge deck with Walthers Goo adhesive.  I spaced them 9" apart and every fourth tie or so I used a square to make sure that there were square with the deck. I then used a notched file card to gauge the overhang distance from the deck beams.

I also used a 7" x 9" switch tie as a spacer to gauge the distance between ties.

Here's the completed bridge deck.  The blue tape marks the center of the bridge and the location of the base of rail for spiking down the first running rail.