Spending a Penny – making a Wills Kit

Entry posted by Silver Sidelines September 9, 2012

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Not a sunny day so an opportunity to make up some plastic kits. I have had couple of Victorian Toilet kits put to one side for some time. Time now to get on with them.

The plan was to use the toilets alongside some existing Hornby Skaledale ‘North York Moors’ buildings – so one of the first jobs was to paint over the green plastic with a ‘maroon’ colour. I also rubbed some matt black paint into the tiled floor and wall surfaces to pick out the joints. A touch of ‘gold’ picked out the pipework.

I wanted to the place the buildings on island platforms. The Wills Kit is designed to butt up against a masonry wall. So - I needed to build my own ‘free standing’ wall.

I had some suitable offcuts from what I will call ‘rigid foam board’ – 3mm thick, faced with cardboard with an inner core of foam as used for lightweight display material. I also had some remnants of Superquick building paper left over from making the platform sides. I made the wall a couple of millimetres longer than the Wills Kit and cut out the quoins to wrap round each end.

I used the coping stones from top of the same sheet of brick paper which I pasted onto some 2mm card which was again cut slightly wider and longer than the wall below.

The plastic parts of the Wills Kit were assembled using my favourite solvent MEK/Butanone. I would say that it was not straightforward getting the pieces to fit at right angles – but perhaps I am out of practice. Finally the cardboard rear wall was offered up to the finished plastic model and fixed using a glue stick.

The model is some 96mm long corresponding to 24 real feet. This seems mighty big for railway toilets. ‘They’ must be expecting large numbers of people - perhaps with a long wait whilst changing trains!