One of the problems with building a specific prototype layout is that you cannot just buy the buildings you need. In the past I have assembled superquick buildings with an amazing tendency to cut off the tabs you need to glue things together. As for my success rate with IKEA flat pack furniture…

So obviously for a first attempt at scratch building it would be wise to start with a garden shed, so I started by building a Brunel Chalet type station which according to the English national Heritage is:

Former railway station. C1865 for the Bristol and Exeter Railway Company. Red brick in Flemish bond with ashlar dressings; Welsh slate roof. Single storey. Symmetrical 5-bay elevation, the end bays projecting slightly. Chamfered ashlar quoins to angles; plinth with chamfered ashlar band; impost band; moulded eaves band. Openings have round arches supported on corbelled imposts. The doorways quoined and with keystones, the 4-pane windows with pilaster jambs and corbelled sills; all openings have fanlights, some boarded up. Deep eaves to hipped, oversailing roof carried by long iron brackets with cusped tracery to spandrels. Two cross-ridge stacks, south-eastern one truncated, north-western one with plinth and corbelled cornice. South-west front has central, 4-pane double-door, upper panels glazed. Similar doorway to centre of north-east front, which has paired windows to end bays. 2-bay south-east gable has doorway on right. 3-bay north-west end has bricked up window on left and 6-panel doors to center and right.

Right then, one of those coming up! Living in Denmark makes popping down to the building with a tape measure a bit expensive. The station building does still exist and is today part of a builders yard. Googling the net gave me few pictures amongst other from http://www.geograph.org.uk where I wrote a quick e-mail to a gentleman who had uploaded a few good photos, it turned out that he lived close to the area and had a lot of archival phots that he scanned in and sent me, so a long overdue public thank you to Nicholas Chipchase for a lot of help. I found the building on Google Earth and from this could measure the size of the roof seen from above and guessimated the dimensions from this. As my ambition was much higher than my talent I spent a long time drawing interiors in Corel draw. These are totally invisible but I know that they are there.

The posters are some that actually where found in stations at this time. They come from http://www.railwaystation.org/postersBR.html and reduced to OO gauge. The colours are correct pantone values for western region stations taken from the fascinating site here http://www.stationcolours.info/ . The Flooring is a real GWR design that I found a sample of on the net and then cloned in Photoshop to get the size I needed.

Mistake nr.5 was the way I made the building out of three separate boxes. This means that the whole station is very warped and crooked. I now have built enough of the excellent Scalescenes to know that next time I will use a different technique. The boxes are cladded with Willis plasticard and the coping and edges were drawn in Corel Draw and cut out with a scalpel and glued ( normally first to my finger) and then finally roughly in place The roof appears to not quite fit the top of the flat section, but it does not do so I reality either, honest!

But my gap is too large. The distinctive chimneys drove me mad!

With the station finally built, I started on the goods shed, By now I had discovered York models excellent lazercut windows which are used in the goods shed. It’s not perfect but I am learning. Again it appears to be unfinished (no eves on the gables), but then the original does not have them either.

The last remaining building that needs to be built is the signal box, I have had two aborted attempts, But must soon try again.

Away from the station there are a couple of other building made from Scale Scenes kits for example the lock keepers cottage.

Here I spent a long time doing the garden. I enjoy making buildings but it just takes me so long compared to people like Allan Downes who knock off an entire town in the time it takes me to cut out a window.

In my next post I’ll discuss electrics and control panels, and then talk about the future. I’m tried to build up enough courage to start fase2.