|
Missouri History Museum Model
Railroad Layout
Tips and techniques for building a model structure
Walthers Cornerstone "REA Freight House"
933-3095
text by Mike Thomas
photos by Richard Schumacher
Railway Express Agency Building
 The
instruction sheet for Walthers' Railway Express Agency
freight house has a page of fine type giving a detailed
description of how the prototype buildings functioned
and how the model might best be integrated into your
layout, but barely two dozen sentences on how actually
to assemble the model. These instructions consist mostly
of explaining the proper sequence of assembly which they
do quite well without saying a word about painting (much
less weathering), or tools, or techniques. I usually
spend more time in the armchair than at the workbench,
so I had to re-learn a lot about assembling a plastic
kit.
Before building a kit I always take all the parts out
of the box, look at them, look at the instructions, then
put everything back in the box, close it again, and go
away. I then repeat this as necessary until I've got up
the nerve to start work. When I finally decided the time
had come to get going on this kit, my first step was to
paint and weather the parts while they were still on the
sprues.
 The
kit is cast in four colors of plastic in addition to
clear plastic window and skylight glazing, so it would
be a nice enough model even if you didn't paint it at
all. The dark brownish-red of the brick walls is an
especially good representation of real brick; brick
comes in a wide variety of colors, but most tend more
toward brown, not red. The very dark gray used for the
corrugated iron canopy over the docks is equally
believable. The warm grey color used to represent the
concrete loading docks and stairs is close, but much too
smooth and uniform. The light gray plastic used for the
window frames, dock doors, man doors, canopy brackets,
and handrails makes them all look like plastic instead
of wood and steel.
My paint box contains a variety of paints, both
water- and solvent-based, and for this kit I used what I
had on hand, applying all of it by brush. One ought to
use water-based paints on unprimed plastic, and mostly I
did. The exception was on the window frames; for these I
used Floquil Weyerhauser Green, because it was the only
paint I had that was a good match for that dark green
that was so widely used for exterior trim and woodwork
up through the 1950's or so. I suppose there was some
particular pigment that was both more durable and less
expensive than the alternatives; at any rate, it looks
to me like just the right color for window sash. I
decided to leave the dock doors grey but painted the
frames green. The brackets that support the canopies
over the loading docks got a coat of Poly Scale Engine
Black. The handrails that go on the steps I painted a
bright safety yellow. I gave the man doors (as opposed
to the coiling dock doors) a solid coat (not just
weathering) of Poly Scale Earth, which has a sort of
generic industrial beige look. These door castings have
a very fine raised border to represent the door frame,
and after the base coat dried I used a very fine brush
to outline the frames in Weyerhauser Green; the door
knob got a tiny dab of black.
The skylights are each a single pyramidal casting of
clear plastic. The mullions between panes of glass are
cast into skylight; I used a permanent laundry marker to
"paint" these black. It doesn't take too much
skill, just some care, to run the edge of the felt tip
along the raised mullions, and it increases the realism
of the skylights enormously.
 The
wall castings don't have brick lines below the level of
the first floor door thresholds. This part of the wall
is mostly hidden by the loading docks and steps, but
those parts that are not hidden are clearly intended to
represent a concrete foundation. Unfortunately, the
whole wall has to be cast in the same brick colored
plastic, so I painted this lower foundation part of the
wall with Poly Scale Mud as a base color, and then set
about using weathering to blend the appearance of this
concrete foundation with the concrete loading docks and
steps. I started by liberally dry- brushing the docks
and steps with Mud to bring them more into line with the
color of the wall foundations. When the forms are first
stripped from real concrete, what you see is almost
entirely the cement paste, which is a cool grey color,
but it doesn't take long for the weather to wear away at
the cement and expose the sand and gravel aggregate.
Around St. Louis, that aggregate, especially the sand,
is usually a warm brown or tan color, so I worked at
giving my model concrete a warmer look by dry brushing
with Earth. Since I was trying to simulate flecks of
color HO scale grains of sand I was careful to use a
very dry brush, but made sure I got a bit of paint on
every part of the concrete. I then dry brushed Grimy
Black in a few spots on the vertical face of the loading
dock, using vertical brush strokes and applying it
mostly near the top to give the appearance of grease or
oil which had run down from the dock. I also added
similar grease marks to the separate casting that
represents a steel angle guard cast into the lip of the
dock.
My basic weathering medium is ink. I fill a film
canister about half full of rubbing alcohol and then add
a dozen or so drops of black ink. I usually use india
(drawing) ink, but when I sat down to this kit I
discovered I had none, and so substituted stamp pad ink.
I laid out all the kit parts except the roof and the
clear plastic glazing material on a large sheet of
corrugated cardboard and began washing them with my ink
and alcohol, applied with a large (3/8") brush. As
the alcohol evaporates the ink would like to bead up on
the plastic, so it tends to stay mixed with the
diminishing quantity of alcohol. Since the alcohol
evaporates last from crevices, such as the brick lines
cast into the walls, that's where most of the ink is
left when the last of the alcohol goes. Prototype dirt
and soot is similarly attracted to prototype crevices,
so the model takes on a very realistic pattern of grime.
The ink also settled well into the corrugations of the
coiling dock doors, giving them some depth and shadow,
and into the corrugations of the iron dock canopy, which
is already dark grey but benefits from the mottling and
variation in grey that the ink gives it.
Even after it has been left overnight to dry, the ink
wash has the disadvantage of staying slightly tacky that
is, it will smudge off on your fingers if you handle the
pieces too much. An overspray of Dullcote will take care
of that.
The last step in weathering the pieces before
assembling them is to add some rust. I have some
Weather-It brand liquid rust, which goes on very thin,
looks at first like I've used way too much, and then as
the vehicle evaporates it actually leaves a very modest
coat of rust behind. I used this on the dock canopies
and canopy brackets, on the dock itself in streaks, and
on the turbine ventilators that go on top of each
skylight.
I followed the kit's order of assembly instructions
step by step, with one exception. Instead of assembling
all four walls onto the base and then trying to drop the
roof into place between the parapets, I left one end
wall off and slid the roof piece into place from the
end. I also cut and installed a piece of stiff cardboard
(from a legal pad) at the third floor level, so that
when a viewer looks in the windows on one side of the
building, they can see only the row of windows for that
floor on the other side. The tops of the second floor
window sash castings make a perfect ledge on which to
rest this cardboard floor; I notched around the stair
landing window that falls between the second and third
floors. I didn't need to install a cardboard second
floor, because this kit has almost no glazing on the
first floor level, so there's no see-through problem to
solve.
I used Testor's Plastic Cement for almost all joints
between opaque plastic parts, dry fitting the parts and
running a very small paintbrush of cement along the
blind side of the joint and letting capillary action
draw the cement into the hairline between pieces. For
attaching the clear glazing I used a generic gap-filling
cyanoacrylate; I probably didn't need the gap-filling
quality but it was the only super-glue in my box. I used
this same cyanoacrylate to attach the handrails to the
stairs and the dock canopy to the brick wall, since
there are joints with very little contact area between
the parts.
Since the most visible part of a building on most
layouts is the roof, I added a little extra detail to
it. The kit has four equally spaced skylights, but no
roof hatch or access ladder to the roof. Flat roofs are
high-maintenance, and skylights are worse, so this
building ought to have some convenient way for the
maintenance man to get up there and patch leaks. I put
the skylight at the stairway end of the building back in
my parts box and cobbled together a roof hatch to take
its place. First I cemented a square of scribed styrene
to form a platform blanking out the entire skylight
curb, which is about eight scale feet square. Roof
hatches come in various sizes, but three foot square or
thereabouts is the most common; since I had to justify
taking out a much larger skylight than that, I made mine
a double-wide, with a pair of hatches that meet in the
middle just like a pair of doors. I cut a rectangle of
flat styrene three feet by six feet, framed it in
styrene H channel, and cemented it over one half of the
scribed platform. A strip of styrene 1x2 represents an
astragal dividing the rectangle into a pair of three
foot by three foot doors. Tiny snippets of 1x2 represent
strap hinges on each leaf ; I hold these in place with
the point of a scriber while I dab cement on, and don't
move the scriber until the cement has completely
evaporated. The entire hatch assembly was painted a
non-descript maintenance department shade of grey, then
got a wash of ink followed by a wash of rust.
The roof itself was the final part of the project. Up
until thirty years or so ago, most prototype flat roofs
were built up from multiple layers of roofing felt each
embedded in a coat of hot asphalt or coal tar. The final
coat of asphalt was often, but not always, topped with
pea gravel; on this model I went with just the felt and
asphalt. I used thin, cheap, yellow tracing paper cut
into 3/8" strips to represent the three foot wide
courses of roofing felt. I slopped down a thick stripe
of Engine Black down the center of the roof deck
(working around the skylights), laid a strip of paper in
it, and then coated the top of the paper with the same
Engine Black. I then worked from this center strip
toward the outside long walls in both directions,
overlapping the strips slightly each time. The paper
swells as it absorbs the paint, creating unrealistically
large wrinkles and puckers, but as it dries it shrinks
again. There are numerous wrinkles left in the tracing
paper roofing felt, but they wind up being much smaller
and more realistic.
|
|
