Calamity Gets a New RR Station - Part 1

If you have been following the construction of my wild west town of Calamity you are thinking that I already have a railroad station, and you would be right. I built the Sarissa Precision railroad station and if you dig back far enough in my blog you will find the series of posts that I wrote about building it.

I have never really been happy with the Sarissa kit though and I pretty much intended to replace almost as soon as I had finished it. I have been periodically going through my plan books and collection of railroad modeling magazines and I finally settled on the new station for Calamity. Its a bit on the fancy side, but I figure that if Calamity really wants to bring new settlers to town they might well start with a fancy new railroad station.

The station I picked out was drawn by Pat Harriman and appears in his plan book "Early Wood Frame and Stone Structures" and appears on page 129. I scanned the plans for my own use since I need to "scale up" the station to fit in with the rest of Calamity (the infamous 1/56th scale that I have settled on). Pat's book is spiral bound which makes it really easy to use since the pages always lay flat.. There are 45 buildings in the book which retails for $29.95. I highly recommend it even if you just use it for reference. This station was built in the town of Phantaci, Oregon by the 
Shelter Bay Railway Company

With this model I elected to skip my standard matte board prototype stage. I'm building this one out of styrene plastic (like the newspaper office I built back in January of this year) and I start marking up the plastic. I had some O scale windows that I thought would work quite well, but they turned out to be to wide. I spend some time browsing at Caboose Hobbies and purchased some S scale windows that, initially, I liked better. As you go through the pictures you can see that I have had a hard time deciding which windows to actually use on this build.

Here are the pictures of stage 1:

Pat Harriman's Depot from "Early Wood Frame and Stone Structures"

Here were the first windows that I had picked out. O Scale versions from Grandt Line.
These are just to big for the look of the building from the plans.

Here's a selection of S scale windows instead. I like the look quite a bit better. Still hadn't decided on upper story windows at this point. And, yes, the bottom floor windows are upside down. This is the right side elevation.

These are the four sides that make up the "bay window" sections. I'm not sure what else to call them. This is the point that I decided I wasn't sure I liked these windows. Something a bit thinner or at least taller might be better.

This is one portion of the front and trackside elevation. The three window will face the tracks the two window section faces the front. At this point I had have settled on the upper windows.

This is the portion of the front and trackside elevation. I like the door but its going to be a little short for some of the miniatures but it matches up nicely with the windows.

I only had the one door so it had to do double duty.

The left side elevation with the freight door.

I found another S scale window in my bag of parts. Its a bit taller than the door so you can see the window is hanging down into the section of vertical planks. If I raise it into the right position the door is to short. At this point a little light bulb went on. I would put the window in the proper position and just modify the door to be a little taller, which will look better with most of Calamity's citizens. 

In the end I have decided on the 8-pane window for the upper story, the 2-pane window for the 1st story and the commercial door and the freight door. The next step is to cut out all this plastic and start cutting out the window and door openings.

I'll be using the following parts from Grand Line:
4024 - 30x78 2 pane, double hung window (17 of these ouch!)
4027 - 27x38 8 pane window
4039 - RGS style door
4040 - RGS style freight door
Everything else will be made from sheet plastic either from Evergreen or Plastruct.

The one thing I will do different this time is to build and paint the interior walls before I start putting the whole thing together. The inside of the newpaper office was really difficult to finish off nicely once I had put it together.

And one last thought. Since I build in an odd scale no scale rulers are available. I built up this reference sheet so I didn't need to do scale conversions in my head all the time.