by Ångstrom
Having modelled railways in the Dorset area of Britain, where most railway buildings are made from stone, I have developed a method of construction based on one first taught to me by the late Doug Bocking.
Walls are made up from 6mm thick balsa wood sheet. When complete and before bedding the wall down in its correct place on the layout, each individual stone of the structure is roughly marked on the balsa with a ball-point pen. Then, using a very hot soldering iron, the outline of each individual stone is burnt into the balsa wood. Thus a three-dimensional representation of the stonework will be evident, something that is lacking with the use of stone paper.
After completion, the stonework is painted all over with a light creamy grey water-based matt acrylic paint of a colour simulating the mortar between individual stones. Make sure that the paint fills all the crevices in the stonework. Next make up a wash of the base colour of the stonework using water-based paint, mixed with a little plaster and water. Paint this mixture onto the surface of about half the individual stones at random, trying to avoid too much paint getting into the crevices. The plaster will help give the paint an ultra-matt and slightly gritty in texture. Next add a little black to the paint mixture, and pick out a number of the remaining stones. Then add a little white, yellow or red, and pick out a few more stones until all are painted. Finally view the finished article and decide whether the resultant colour effect is what you had in mind. If it is too dark, make up a lighter shade of the base colour and paint over the darkest of the stones. If too light do the opposite. If too yellow or too red, pick out the worst offenders with a complimentary colour. Always err on the too light side because when all is finished and the wall stuck in place on the layout, it is very easy to darken the whole thing with a wash of much-watered-down matt black paint.
The basic structure of any building can be made up using card, styrene or metal, depending what medium you work best in. My favourite material is double-sided printed-circuit board material (PCB) because it is very strong, can be cut out using a guillotine, can be soldered together, and last but not least off-cuts of the material can be obtained free. To the basic structure is glued a thin veneer of balsa wood, and then the stonework is burnt on with a soldering iron and painted as described above. Of course, you could make the structure from balsa wood from the start, but in my opinion, such structures are too weak, and vulnerable to damage.
The only way of making excellent models of steel structures, at least in the smaller scales, is from metal. A study of steel railway structures will show that they are made from angle iron or I beams. There are many good etched-brass kits available for things like footbridges, but all these kits suffer from using flat metal rather than angle iron. So, if you want the best possible representation of the real thing, you will have to scratch build. Most good model shops sell lengths of brass angle and beams, but the small-scale modeller will probably find that these sections are too heavy for most structures. Again therefore, if you want the best, you will have to make it yourself. Above all, this means you will need a guillotine.
On the steel structures I have made, I start from 0.25mm annealed brass sheet. Strips of this brass are guillotined to size and then made into imitation angle-iron by hammering a longitudinal right-angled bend into the strip while the strip was held in specially-machined steel vice clamps. The individual components of the structure are then soldered together. Hand rails and safety wire are made from stretched nickel-silver wire and also soldered into place.
Picket fences are used around all railway property within station limits. These can be made from plastic kits, but to maintain reasonable strength, the plastic is made over scale thickness, and always looks plastic as a result. If you have the use of a guillotine, picket fences can be made from metal strip which is soldered together.
Line-side fencing outside the stations on most British railways consists of heavy wooden or concrete posts through which is strung heavy-gauge wire. These can be made up in model form very easily. I make up square posts from 1.6mm printed circuit board by guillotining it up into long lengths, and then snipping them to size. The advantage of this material is strength and ease to which it can be soldered. Rather than drilling through the fence posts, which would be a unnecessarily tedious and difficult job, the fencing wire can be soldered directly to the fence posts, once these have been planted. I space my fence posts 25mm apart, and leave them 15mm above the ground level. I plant them into holes drilled into the baseboard or scenic shell using PVA glue. Then I solder four lengths of 0.2 mm stretched nichrome wire to the posts. If such fine nichrome or nickel-silver wire is unobtainable, brass or even copper wire would do at a pinch. Whatever wire you use, you must stretch it first between two pairs of pliers so that it starts straight and work hardened.
Wooden structures such as coal pens, coal stages, trestle bridges or station halts can most easily be made from balsa-wood or plastic strip. Both these materials tend to be a bit weak on their own, so it is worth making major parts of the structures from strip wood that can be obtained from model-boat shops, or good modelling shops. Flimsy structures such as gates should be made from metal or printed circuit board so give them strength and prototypical thickness of base material.
On behalf of Ken Gray and with his permission, I should like to briefly describe his methods of building construction.
The basic material used is 1.2mm thick Bainbridge board, which is a high quality card obtainable from most reputable art shops. After cutting out the components of the building with a craft knife, the card is coated with two thin layers of Shellac. Shellac is made by dissolving commercial Shellac flakes in methylated spirits. French polish is the same thing.
Walls are built up from multiple thicknesses of card until the correct prototypical thickness is obtained. The individual layers are glued together with Selleys Hobby Glue and clamped while the glue dries. The individual walls are glued to each other with PVA glue.
All interior walls and partitions are included, partly to improve the internal appearance as seen through the windows, but more importantly to increase the strength and rigidity and therefore improve the overall appearance of the model.
Plastiglaze is used for the windows and the completed structures are covered with brick or stone paper.