Sunshine, Palm Trees and a Food Industry...

The interconnecting module has been fully wired up...

Holes to pass the plugs through have been made with a drill and jigsaw... (very roughly I might add !)

Plenty of slack on the plugs...

I have one more module to wire up and at this stage, I will only wire it for two sidings as I still haven't made my mind up as to what I will model on the module, but I am liking the idea of Trujillo...

Now I can put these two completed modules back into place and do a test run with a locomotive. Fingers crossed it all works !

Cheers, Gary.

 

May layout update... enjoy !



Cheers, Gary.

 

I have started to build the Trujillo & Sons building for the layout.

After studying the prototype from various angles, I took the best bits from it and selectively compressed the building to suit the space I have allocated. Here are some prototype pics from Google Earth...

A few sketches with some very basic measurements and what I wish to capture on the model...

After measuring it all up, it was time to draw a few lines onto the 3mm thick box board and start cutting it all out. The pic below shows the left hand end of the building (silo end).

I'll be back on the job on Sunday morning, hoping to have the building all glued up with all walls in place etc.

Cheers, Gary.

 

Slowly the building is coming together. Apart from the rear walls, everything is going along as planned. I did decide to strep back the smaller single story section of the building to give a little more character to the building. Just moving it back 12 scale inches makes a difference to how it looks.

Plenty of gussets have been added to help keep the model square. More will go in when the roof is applied.

Being an older building, I will have a few concrete patches in the wall where the door ways once were when the building served 40' boxcars and reefers. The hatching shows where these patch ups will be.

I will be leaving one door in the up position so that the interior can be seen. A floor was glued into place and eventually an interior will be added.

More as it happens.

Cheers, Gary.

 

Thanks Gormo. It is the little things that count !

Cheers, Gary.

 

Didn't get too much done on the Trujillo build, but some is better than nothing !

I had been thinking about the roof for some time and I was thinking that such a large building would possibly not have a flat roof, but perhaps a roof with peaks and troughs. Something similar to this diagram...

To do this I measured the length of the roof and added a few millimeters as the angles would be slightly longer than having the individual sections flat. A piece of 3mm box board was cut to shape, and each section of the roof was marked up and then cut accordingly.

The two very end sections are single pieces whereas the other sections were cut as doubles, with a score down the middle that allowed the sections to bend, creating a gable. In the image above, the dashes represent the score line. The heavy lines represent the cut line.

The valleys between the gables is where the roof sections are supported. I measured and marked a line 6mm below the top of the wall and I glued in the roof supports.

The roof supports have gussets underneath to keep them from sagging. This can be seen here...

The outer roofing sections were glued in first and then from each side, I added the next sections. I glued one side first, then made sure the ridges were at the same height as the wall, before gluing in the second valley. A bead of CA was then applied where the wall and gable meets for added strength.

The next task was to line the larger door openings with Evergreen Styrene angle. Here I used 2.5mm angle (#293) to surround the side walls and the top of the door (lintel). The floor section had Evergreen Styrene 3.2mm angle added (#294).

The smaller roller doors I used Evergreen Styrene 2mm angle (#292) around the sides and top (lintel).

To the top of the walls I added a weather sill. Here I used 3.2mm x 0.25mm Evergreen Styrene strip (#106) along the top of the wall edge and also the cap of the wall.

To this I added the 2mm angle (#292).

As you can see in the above photo, roller doors were added in both the open and closed position. I used a very this double sided corrugated sheet for this. Sorry, I don't know what the product number is for this, but it looks the part !

The corrugated sheet was cut to the correct size and glued into the recess between the 2.5mm angle and the card opening. This photo demonstrates this...

A pic of the full door from the inside...

and how the doors look from the outside (small roller door)...

One thing I have considered is adding a very thin strip of styrene to the inside door opening, where the roller doors are in the up/open position. This will give the impression of the roller door guide track.
If it is easy enough to do, I will do it, but if it's difficult, I'll give it a miss...

Next up I will add a window, the personnel doors, door handles, conduits, switch boards, light switches etc, followed by some roofing material to the lean to and low roof extension.

Cheers, Gary.

 

This afternoon I managed to get the window in, personnel doors, the roller door track on the open roller doors. I'll look at photos of the prototype to see where the electrical conduits and switch boards are located before adding these.

The window aperture needed a little fettling to allow it to fit perfectly...

The personnel doors are in, complete with door handles. I decided to have one door in the open position, the other shut...

The very thin strips of styrene that make up the roller door track...

You can see that there is some roofing material in place on the lean to and the lower extension. This is not yet fixed in place. This will be glued in at a later date.

Now time to get back to checking out the prototype building for further details.

Cheers, Gary.

 

I was planning to build the second Trujillo building opposite the one I am currently building, as show in these two photos.

I decided against this as I will look to pre-date the layout to an earlier time, closer to 2000 - 2010. Currently, this is what the area looks like as of 2023...

This is what it looked like in 2011...

Even though I won't get to model the whole entrance section (under name) of the building, I will have a portion of it and the railside length of office section and of course the loading platform and awning.

By building this, it will give me a lower building to reach over for when I need to uncouple cars, compared to building the larger (higher) Trujillo warehouse.

As usual, the sketches were made and the card has been lined and cut...

That's it for now, more as it happens...

Cheers, Gary.

PS. A busy work bench is a good work bench ! A photo of the bench before I started on the Graulich International building...

 

Tolga East Coast is excellent viewing. I often message Tolga and ask him questions in relation to the Down Town Spur. Lance Mindheim is producing some excellent prototypical operations on his layout.





Cheers, Gary.

 

Modelling has slowed down a little over the last couple of days as I haven't been feeling all that well. I'm getting over the bug and will resume shortly.

Cheers, Gary.

 

As some of you may know, I have been struck down with covid again. I only found this out on Thursday morning so I have been off work since.

This has given me some time to get back into the scratch building of the Graulich International building that I started talking about in post #570.

So, what have I done...?

The front wall was drawn up and all the apertures have been cut. This includes the large roller doors, the personnel doors and the large vents above and between each roller door. Of course this building is not 100% correct in prototype length and I have used selective compression in some parts, although this model is 35" in length, you wouldn't think so !

I learned a way of making the vents from a fellow NMRA member Steve Pettit, and I used 1.5mm quarter round Evergreen styrene (#248). Pieces were cut to just over 3 scale feet in length. This gives me some edge to file down to make them square.

These are glued to pieces of styrene sheet, again, just over 3 scale feet square, allowing for some fine tuning. Seven lengths of 1/4 round were glued to the sheet. This was repeated five times. Once these five vents were filed down, they were edged with 0.75 x 2.0mm Evergreen strip (#134). When the strip had cured, the ends were trimmed up, as per the photo below.

The apertures for the vents in the card were filed enough for a firm fit and the vents were glued into place.

You can see in the above photo that the openings for both roller and personnel doors were also trimmed up. The roller doors were trimmed in Evergreen 2mm angle (#292) and the personnel doors with Evergreen 1.5mm angle (#291).

One millimeter styrene sheet was cut to size to fit the personnel door openings. I drilled a hole 3 scale feet up and 6 scale inches in from the edge and added door handles. Door handles were made using the cigarette lighter method. Once again, corrugated styrene sheet was used for the roller doors.

The office end of the building was next and I started on the long side wall. The prototype has four windows and what looks to be a blanked out door/entrance. Idecided to model the door, but only three windows.
The apertures were cut, windows being a scale 6' long x 4' high and the door, a standard 3' wide, 7' high. All these were trimmed with 1.5mm angle (#291).

An end wall was created with a portion of window in it, (around 3/4) and it too was trimmed up with the angle. Clear styrene sheet was measured, cut, checked, cut again until all glazing fit. This was secured with MEK from the inside using a thin bead along the outer edges. Gladly it did not frost up the clear sheet !

Now having the bulk of the rail side structure done, I went on to cutting up a length of 3mm card and secured into place, making the building a wedge shape. The back was was secured first then I added spacers on the inside to help keep it all square and also to support the roof.

I used the roof sheet as a guide to place the spacers inside, just to make sure I wasn't going to end up with a wonky rear wall.

Once the spacers were in and the roof secured, it was time to cut another piece of card for the platform canopy. This was cut to the same width as the platform and included the slight angle to the end. A wedge was cut to size (scale 15') and I used this to make sure the roof went on square and flat. Starting at one end, I used the wedge every 80mm holding the roof section against iot and flowing in a little CA between the roof and the wall.

This method proved very helpful and the whole lot looks pretty square.

On the far end of the building, there is a ramp that leads to the yard behind the building.

I had a little space on the edge of the layout for me to model the scale 10' wide ramp, but only about 2' of the ramp...

I have made a start on the stairs/landing for the side door and once that is in place, I will start to add the piping details and any roof vents etc.

Cheers, Gary.

 

Thank you kindly Philip. I'm doing my best, both with recovery and modelling !

Cheers, Gary.

 

Thanks Gormo. I am slowly on the mend and feel much better than I had been from Thursday afternoon through to Saturday. Just got to kick this damn cough..., again !

It is funny with these buildings, they don't look much at this stage of the build, but once the details, painting and weathering has been added, they tend to look a little better.

Cheers, Gary.