It has been my quest to help tare down the walls and stereotypes of scratch building.  The level of satisfaction that you gain from creating a structure from scratch verses kit built is larger by volumes.  However, it can also be a huge disappointment as well if the results are not what was expected.  The purposes of these Scratch Building 101 articles that I have written are to try to make you comfortable and learn some of the basics.  Many times I have seen people want to build some large and complex structure as their first out of the gate, I know because I did the same thing.  What happens is it starts going wrong, they get frustrated and then they give up.  If you would spend a little time on one or more simple structures, it will pay off in the long run.  I love doing little structures, even if I have no need for it because I practice new techniques and hone skills on them.  Also you are not as attached to then so you can experiment with things you haven’t tried.

Introduction

For this two part article and our third in the Scratch Building 101 series, I will teach you how to build a small Pennsylvania Railroad station.  More specifically a type W-3 variation that at one time sat in the town of Delair New Jersey.  Delair is on the southern leg of the of the PRR Bordentown Branch / Bordentown Secondary that ran between Camden and Trenton, NJ.  Today this line still exists and is primarily used by New Jersey Transit and is called the River LINE.  There also exists a few industries along the line that are served by CSX.

Unfortunately the station was raised sometime during the late 50′s or early 60′s.  Finding any photos of the station online have been unsuccessful, however if you have the book Pennsylvania Railroad Facilities Volume 3: Philadelphia Division, it is located on page 69.

Construction

Like the first building in this series, Sinclair Service Station, construction will be very similar at first.  It is primarily built from styrene with commercially manufactured windows.  However, I ran into a few areas of the construction that were a little more difficult than I had expected.  They are not extremely challenging but are more of an intermediate level.

Dimensions that I give will be in scale feet, so if I say this piece needs to be cut 12′ long, that would be in N Scale feet.  The one exception will be when I talk about thicknesses of materials being used, such as strip styrene and it will be in decimal form (.025″).  Hopefully this doesn’t cause too much confusion.

Walls

The first part of most structures you will build will be the walls, so lets start there.  For the walls I chose to use Evergreen .030″ spacing Clapboard siding.  The one down side to this, is that it is .040″ thick.  so multiple cuts will need to be done to get through the walls.

With clapboard siding, you need to constantly pay attention to it because there is and up and a down and it is easy to mix up what direction your walls are.  For cutting the walls out, that isn’t too critical right now.  Start off by making a mark that is 13 1/2′ up from the long side of the sheet.  Make the same mark on the opposing end of the sheet.  This should fall right on one of the groves on the front of the sheet, this will help keep your blade straight as you make your cuts.  Using a good straight edge, line it up to your two marks, when lined up, hold it tight with one hand and start making your cuts.  The first few cuts should be very light and all you want is to form that grove that your blade will follow, then you can start using more pressure on later passes.  If you start off using a lot of pressure, you risk having your blade wander on the sheet and get sloppy cuts.

After you have the 13 1/2′ strip cut out, we are ready to cut the walls free.  If you have a Chopper, this will be a much faster and accurate step, if not it will take a little longer.  We need a total of four walls, two that are 25′ long and two that are 17′ long.  using your scale ruler, mark off for the first 25′ long piece and start cutting.  Repeat this step for the second 25′ piece and the two 17′pieces.  Now you have your walls.

Windows & Doors

This next step can be very tedious and challenging, but if you have patience, you will be fine.  Now the very first thing I would do is to mark on the back of each wall, UP, with an arrow pointing to the top.  We will be primarily be working on the back and we need to make sure don’t cut the windows out the wrong way.  Now the reason I like to wok on the back is because of the texture that is on the front, it will effect your marking & cutting.  Because this building is symmetrical, we wont need to worry about laying out the lines backwards.

Now lets lay out where our windows & doors are going to be placed on the 25′ long walls.  I first start out by doing my horizontal lines first, so add tick marks to either side starting from the bottom at 4′ 6″ and at 10′ 6″ up.  This should leave you with 2′ left from the top line to the top of the wall.  Next we do the vertical lines on the top and bottom starting from the right at 3′ then 6′ 6″ and 10′ 3″.  Now repeat the same marks starting from the left side.  After the marks are all in, start to connect them with lines.

For the 17′ walls, do the same horizontal marks as on the 25′ walls.  For the vertical marks, start again on the right and mark at 3′ 3″ and at 6′ 9″, repeat on the top and again on the left side.  When all of the lines are drawn in, I draw x’s through the sections that will be cut out, this helps to stop cutting mistakes.  To help ease laying out these marks, I included a guide (figure 2) to help you visualize how it should look.

All of the lines are laid out and you should be ready to cut so more than anything remember to take your time because this will take a little time.  Just like your multiple passes with cutting out the walls, you will do the same but you only cut where the openings are going to be.  One word of advice on the 25′ walls, cut the door out last because you could bend or break the wall at the weak point above it.

Glue Up

In the four corners of the station I added .040″ square strip styrene, this serves a few purposes.  First it simulates the boards that are applied to the buildings corners and second it gives us a clean and stable corner.  The one issue with doing this method is the walls are .040″ thick and the strip is also .040″ thick.  This may sound okay, but the square corners will stick out from the siding by a hair.  Then to join the other wall, you will have to make it flush, which we don’t want to do.  So to solve this, we need to bevel the back edge a little so the two walls will join (see figure 2).  To bevel the walls, just file or sand a small bevel in to the back corners where the walls will join.  It doesn’t need to be perfect, but enough that the walls will clear each other.  I then glue in the corner pieces on to the 25′ long wall sections edges.

After letting the glue setup for a short time you can now glue the 25′ walls to the 17′ walls, forming two L shaped sections.  I then braced the corner by gluing a .060″  square strip on the inside corner to add strength.  Make sure that both sections a square and that neither wall is twisted or skewed.  Let them dry for a brief time and then glue the two L assemblies to each other, again checking for being square and by adding the “060″ square into the corners.

To finish up the assembly of the walls, I added plenty of strength to it by gluing up a frame work of .060 x .080″ strip styrene.  I  braced the walls with the .060 x .080″ strip above and below the windows on the side walls and above the windows and doors on the front and back.  While this may or may not be necessary, I like to do it to make sure there is as little movement as possible.  I now have a very strong and sturdy little structure.

Paint & Windows

I have found that I like to paint as I go, if you prefer to finish the building and then paint it afterword, then go ahead and find what works for you.

To begin with, I painted the walls and windows (tic-2508) with Polly Scale SP Lettering Grey (414179).  After it had dried I masked off at about 4′ or 10 boards up from the bottom of the walls.  When masked I painted the wainscot or bottom third of the station with Polly Scale L & N Gray (414380).  I also used the same paint to color the trim on the windows and on the corner posts.

Because of the larger 4′ wide door on the station and unable to find a suitable match in N Scale, I have to scratch build ones to fit.  For the time being we will just build the door frame and add the transom window above the door.  I first added a strip of .010 x .040″ styrene on the side of each opening, I did not add on to the top.  I left the pieces a little long and when the glue set up, I trimmed them flush with the bottom of the walls.  Next I added the trim of the door frame on the outside with the same .010 x .040″ strip styrene.  First I added a piece across the top and then the two on either side of the two doors.  I trimmed everything up and the frame was done.  The last part to be done was to add the transom window above the door.  I used a 6 lite window (tic-2510) that was flipped upside down.  On one of my doors this fit perfectly and on the other I had to do a little filing to get it to fit.  As long as it isn’t small, you should be fine.  I then painted it all in the L & N Gray as the res of the trim and the wainscot.

End of Part One

This finishes off part one of our two part series.  In part two we will start by building the roof and then make our way to finish the structure.