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.
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