The Car Shop

While I've been focused on building the railroad South from Kendall, I've been ignoring the North end of the yard.  The North end is where the engine terminal is located and other than roughing in the turntable, I haven't done much. The terminal also includes a roundhouse, coaling tower, water tower and a separate car shop building.  The Southport car shop building is a three-bay, wood sided structure with full clerestory roofs and large windows running the length of the building. Through selective compression, I reduced the building from a three-bay structure to two-bays, and chopped about one-third off its length. Even at that, it's a big building.

The photo shows the footprint of the structure with two RF-16s on the near track. The track is embedded through the building and I used gray mat board to represent a concrete floor.

I have only seen one photo of the car shop building, and a its a poorly lit B&W photo. I had no dimensions to work with and basically scaled what I could from the photos.  The original structure had vertical wood sheathing sort like a double sheathed box car.  I couldn't discern any colors from the old photo, but I actually know someone who worked as a hostler at Southport in the late '50s and was told that the buildings were either painted gray or had weathered to that color.

The photo shows the visible side wall and one of the end walls temporarily supported in place. I used Northeastern scribed siding for the walls and stained them with an India ink alcohol solution. I cut repetitive end marks on the siding boards to suggest a pattern of how the boards were nailed to the side of the building. This turned out rather well. The building wall is 24-ft tall and the no single siding board would be  that long.  While the stained wood siding looked good, it needed to be enhanced to look like faded paint on wood siding.  I recently read an article in the Short Line and Narrow Gauge Gazette that used pastels to represent the faded paint, so I thought I would give it a try.

The photo shown different shades of gray pastels coloring individual boards to represent faded wood siding where most of the paint was gone. I was pleased with the end result.

I applied different shades of pastel by starting at where the siding board ends and dragging the pastel along the board the logic being that individual boards will weather differently.

The structure is far from complete but it's off to a good start.