Railway Station Part Six

Sometimes a rainy Saturday morning is all the excuse you need to finish that model kit you've been telling yourself you'll get around to completing one day. That day was today, and the kit in question was none other than my railway station building, the one building that is supposed to be the star of the show but had sat awaiting the final finishing touches for sooo long that I'd simply become accustomed to it looking the way it did. Well, not anymore.

I always paint the parts of laser-cut timber kits before assembling them.

There wasn't really that much to be done to the Model Train Buildings NSW A-4 station building in order to say that is was finished. So I got to work painting the fascia boards and strip of guttering for the rear of the building. If you're familiar with building one of Walker Models' laser cut kit buildings, then you'll understand that painting over the blackened edges where the laser has cut through the timber or MDF sections can be a little difficult using a light colour. I wanted to paint the fascia trim white to match the white window frames visible on the rear of the building, but thought the blackened edges could work in my favour if I simply applied a thin wash of white paint so as to let a little of the black show through. It turned out that it worked, with the finished white fascia trim looking a little weathered as though the paint has been faded by the hot Australian sun. The thing I like most about working with timber kits is that you get a much more realistic finish than a plastic model, and they end up looking like miniature buildings rather than model kits.

I spaced the brush strokes when using the Rustall to make the roof resemble sheets of weather beaten corrugated iron.

While waiting for these to dry, I set to work on finishing the roof with a light application of Rustall, following the same process as I outlined when constructing my NSWGR G-2 goods shed. The rear loading dock off the parcels room I finished by painting in assortment of brown, black and grey stripes to resemble timber planking. I simply mixed the colours together on a palette and ensured no two brush strokes were alike. Once complete, I set this aside and started work on the two chimneys.

The chimney sections just needed an angled trim to sit flush on the roof.

The chimneys were tricky little suckers! Although they fitted together with perfection, applying too much pressure with your fingers caused them to collapse in on themselves. Eventually I had them glued square using some fast drying white PVA tacky glue, and sat back to wait for them to dry.

You can't be too perfect when painting aged brick chimney stacks.

Painting them was a three part process. First I filled all the laser etched mortar lines with some white acrylic paint before wiping the paint from the surface of the bricks using some dry paper toweling. Then I could gently dry brush some burnt sienna acrylic onto the surface of the brick pattern by making sure the paint was well wiped from the brush before making each stroke.

Once more I used a silver paint pen marker to work some magic on the down pipes.

I was left with an odd gap on the rear left hand side of the building where I'd trimmed the fascia board too short. Feeling that the building could use a down pipe anyway, I made one from one of those clear plastic nozzles that attach to the end of an aerosol can to give a concentrated squirt of whatever into hard to reach places. I simply painted it silver with a silver paint marker, and when dry trimmed it to fit as shown in the picture below.

I made the down pipe longer than the building so it will spill to ground over the brick foundations the station rests on.

Having a hole in the core of the areosol nozzle tube makes the down pipe look so realistic when viewed from above. However, the silver looked a little too shiny for an old timber railway station building, so I gave it a treatment of rust, once more using the Rustall that I've come to love. You can see the difference in the photo below.

I'm so glad I made the backdrop on my layout reversible so that I can view the building from both sides.

With the chimneys, down-pipe and fascia boards glued in place, the building was ready to put back in place on the platform. When viewed in correct lighting, I particularly like the subtle finish I gave the railway station roof. At first I was just going to glue the fascia boards to three sides of the building, and simply let the imaginary rain run off the platform awning onto the tracks (as shown in the top photo), but the end result just didn't look right compared to how good the rear of the building came up. So I lifted the building back off and added a strip of white guttering to the front platform awning using some scrap birchwood sheeting, and completed the kit by scratch-building a second rusty angled down pipe that you can just see in the right of picture.

And finally, Philden Railway Station is finished!

So there you have it. Thanks to a rainy Saturday morning, I can finally say that Philden Railway Station has joined my growing list of finished structures. While I still may come back one day in the future and add the Station Master, Parcels, Toilet and Waiting Room signs above the doorways, the beauty of having made my structures removable is that it is not going to require surgery to lift the station building back off should I choose to do so.

See also; Railway Station Part Five and Railway Station Part Four and Railway Station Part Three and Railway Station Part Two and Railway Station Part One and Building a Station Platform