Booking Hall

Fuelling point completed. This makes up into a really nice item. I added the delivery hose, made from wire painted black. I also added some extra diesel stains to the base.

Before I fix the pavement down, I needed to construct the wall components, and as they have recessed panels in them I needed to know where the urinal would go first, which in turn meant I needed to build the diesel storage tank which will fit alongside the urinal! So yesterday was spent building that and the pump stand. Both of these are Wordsworth Model Railway downloads. I wasn't convinced that glueing the roof of the delivery stand to the rolled up paper columns would work in the long run, so I made a slightly longer core from a used sparkler.

Pavement planning. I'm using the Model Railway Scenery grey slabbed pavings download.

Main signs now fitted and prints made for the perimeter wall, pavements and fuel oil tank. The printed windows for the offices look remarkably effective on a photo!

Roof now on, just the ridge pieces to fit. Rather than use cereal box card for the roof planes, instead I used 1.3mm artists mounting board, decent sized offcuts of which I get free from a loacl picture framer. I felt this would give a more realistic 'thickness' to the corrugated roof, as well as being less prone to buckling. What remains to be done? Signs, both internal and external. I've had a go at creating a 'WEST YORKSHIRE' sign in Excel, as that is the area of bus operation he is most interested in. Then I need to build some perimeter walls gates and pavements. Possibly also a diesel fuel oil tank and delivery pump. The gentleman's urinal is a Wordsworth Model Railway download, and I built it a while ago to test out their kits. Now I've found a use for it! It looks like I might have time to add some further detail to the office block after all.

Internal columns fitted, and roof shells made. Although I've made these as per instructions, with cereal box card, they would have been better made from mounting board or 2mm card, to add strength and rigidity.

A finished view of the door surrounds, and the interior steel columns made. They take a bit of time to roll up and glue, but they are very sturdy and look good.

Hi Stewart, thanks for pointing those out to me, I can definitely make use of some of them. Cheers!

Had a visit from Chris Nevard the other day, doing a photo shoot of Brierley Canal Road and my other layout "Weydon-Priors" for possible articles in a future Model Rail magazine. It was a real pleasure watching him work. His photos show detail on the layout even I didn't know existed!!

Sorry Thindude, I keep meaning to look into this for you, but my metric tap and die set is down at the model railway club and I keep forgetting to bring it home!! Do you still need the answer?

Today's efforts saw the buttresses made and the front one fitted, also the decorative door surrounds made and fitted.

You're right, I'll leave the office block loose until near the end, and if I have time I can add them then. Trouble is, that's making me wish that I'd cut out the windows and glazed them, and then, of course, I'd have needed to model some interior . . .

Roof cross beams, or girders, now fitted. There are sufficient for about nine in the kit, but the instructions suggest fitting only five, to allow room to get at the buses! Office block also built and placed in position. I used the optional personnel door and modelled it in the open position inside the bus area. If I was building this kit for myself, I think that i would add sills and lintels to the office block doors and windows. EDIT, - incidentally, the asphalt roof wrap for the office block was several mm larger in length and width than the core block, necessitating some trimming to make it fit the core properly.

All main walls now in place.

With the rear wall firmly secured, I could add the side walls. In order for the corner to be neat, the inner layer of the side walls is made slightly shorter than the outer one, to make a 'joggled' joint. I found this needed some delicate trimming to get a good fit. All the wall outer wraps are over length to allow for wrapping around the corner when assembled. Some of these, being duplicated, needed trimming off and I chose to arrange them so that all the cut ends were at the back, or down the side, rather than facing the front.

Concertina doors made and fitted, and some interior detail added to the rear wall. The wraps for these are intended to fit to approximately 4mm thick card. I cut these out of bits left over from the 2x2mm sheets I laminated together for the beams, but being so small they were a right pig to do! In hindsight, making them from a suitable piece of balsa would might have been easier. Clearly, it's possible to go to town here and add pipework, air lines, conduit etc. but i'm leaving it at this. I test fitted the first wall to the prepared base, and reluctantly concluded that it wasn't going to work. The cardboard base just wasn't completely flat, and being quite stiff, I thought that it would pull and distort the structure, so I gave up on it. Instead I cut a larger base from 5mm foamboard sheet and sprayed it with a patchy coat of satin black, followed by a light and patchy brushing of talc. The rear wall was then glued down using 'Hard As Nails' which is solvent free (again, from the £1 shop).

Time to join together the left and right hand sections to make the full length of the front and rear walls. The instructions require you to cut out a pre-printed matching section of wrap sheet, fold it and stick it over the inside of the central butt joint. To add strength to the joint I decided to use the wrap piece to cover some 1.3mm mounting board, so that it would look more like an internal pier. This needs to be cut short at the top to allow the roof beams to be fixed in place. I also departed from the build instructions and fixed the long top beams in place before fixing the front and rear walls to the base. I reckoned it would be easier to do this with the walls flat on the desk.

I'll have to try that Kevan, sounds like it simplifies things a lot. Thanks.

Although the spraymount glue I have been using is excellent, the downside is the cost. I had to buy a new tin recently and it was over £10, so I looked for a less costly alternative. In one of my favourite haunts (the £1 shop!) I found 'Rapide Heavy Duty Spray Adhesive' at - you've guessed! - £1 a tin. Stated to be "ideal for card, paper etc...", only 200ml compared to the 400ml one I've been using, but at a fifth the price it was worth a try! Initial results were slightly discouraging. The glue comes out in a jet, rather than a fine atomised spray like the other one. The hole in the spray nozzle is larger than the Spraymount one, so I tried to fit that nozzle to the new tin, but unfortunately the valve tube is larger, and it wouldn't go on. When I get a moment I'll go and have a look at the nozzles on the car paint aerosols in the garage to see if one of them will fit. But in the meantime, I worked out that if I gave the card I wanted to glue a couple of quick squirts, and immediately spread the quite runny glue out with a piece of card, I got a thin, even coat, which gave very good adhesion, so I might be on to a winner. As the glue is quite 'wet' when it comes out of the can, it quickly bleeds through paper, so it's only good for spraying onto the card components, but I reckon I can live with that for the large pieces. The smaller wrap layers I stick with a 'pritt-type' stick anyway, again, bought in bulk from the £1 shop.

Going back to an earlier stage, I printed the windows on photographic paper, to get some shine on them. I think, if I make this kit again, I will cut out the window openings on the inside layer as well (they are just printed windows in the kit) and print the windows on OHP film to get some transparency.

That's a new one on me ColinK. Time for some research methinks!

I got to the part of the instructions which said 'prepare your base'. As it happened, I had lying around a piece of double wall corrugated cardboard which I had cut from the bottom of a fruit or tomato crate picked up from a supermarket. You get some funny looks though when searching for one that isn't too bent! This is just big enough for the double-width depot with the office block on the side; and deep enough to have a yard area in front of the depot. The actual size of the cardboard is 557 x 347mm. My plan is to surround the front yard with a wall with two gates in it, and have a pavement on the public side, so it would have been helpful to have another 30-40mm depth, but the crate wouldn't give me that. Rather than use the printed 'tarmac' sheets that come with the kit, I sprayed the base firstly with satin black and then a patchy coat of grey primer, both from the £1 shop. Unfortunately, I ran out of primer before I really got the desired look of weathered tarmac that I was after, so I might try some talcum powder to lighten it up (do they make talc with an old engine oil scent?)

A friend, who is an ex bus driver, has a birthday coming up. Both he and I are very interested in vintage buses (as well as railways) and he has a collection of 1/76 scale ones. We normally give each other bus or railway orientated books for birthdays and Christmas, but this year I decided to build him a model bus depot in which to display his collection. Modelrailwayscenery.com supply a card kit download, and having made several Scalescenes.com models in the past I thought this would be fun to do, so one was bought. I chose the corrugated asbestos roof and blue brick version. You never know when those particular textures might come in handy on a model railway!! And so work started with a month to go before the big day! I printed out the core templates on ordinary copier paper and the wrap sheets on laser paper with the printer set to high quality. There are a lot of sheets to print out - 40 or 41, and some have to be printed twice, not including the instructions! (I was building the double fronted version) The kit is designed to use thin card, approximately 1mm thick, and I stuck most of the core templates to the printed side of cereal packet card, which is about 0.7mm, collected over several months. Some parts are to be laminated to 4mm thickness (beams etc.) Rather than try and cut up to six separate cores to laminate together, I stuck two sheets of 2mm greyboard together and fixed the templates to that. Although cutting these was much harder, at least it meant that the beams were all square and true, and I doubted I would have achieved as good a result following the kit instructions. Although an expensive way of doing it, I used High-tac Mount Spray obtained from my local stationers shop for adhering the overlays, and, to start with, the cover layers. So, a couple of evening later, I had a lot of core templates and had started by sticking the front wall overlays onto them.

Glad I could help, even if it wasn't quite what you asked for!

Are these any help?