sheet, part 1015. Like many modelers, I’ve fought my way through applying Campbell shingles to model roofs, and the basic idea is great. But I believe the result is more irregular than real shingle roofs would be in HO scale. Instead, I think a shake roof, or a wellaged roof, on which shingles have warped and become irregular, would be a better use for the Campbell shingles. For ordinary shingle roofs, I prefer a manufactured, uniform roofing like the Pikestuff material (rixproducts.com). The Sylmar depot plan shows lots of windows and doors. Luckily there are Grandt Line (grandtline.com) architectural features, both windows and doors, which capture the main look of the SP depot features, even if none of them are an exact match. Here is the list of Grandt parts I selected. Small freight room windows: “horizontal sliding window,” part 5081 Waiting room doors: “factory front door,” part 5139 room & bay windows: “6/4 Waiting double-hung window,” part 5233 Side windows on bay: “8-pane window,” part 5255 The Grandt 5233 and 5255 windows would need to have the mullions removed in the lower sash to match the Sylmar plan. This could be easily done with a sharp (fresh) hobby blade. On the other hand, single-pane Page 40 • Nov 2012 MRH
lower sash windows were uncommon in SP depots generally, which means that leaving the windows in stock form is a more typical look. That leaves only the freight room doors, which can be represented by adding trim strips to a flat panel.
4
In planning my model depot, then, the window and door openings are adjusted to fit the Grandt parts. All are adequately close to the prototype dimensions. The size of trim boards for the corners of the building is an interesting challenge, because SP depots did not always use the same size boards for this application. A common size was 1 x 8-inch boards, both for corner trim and for window and door surrounds. But careful examination of photos, and scaling of sizes, also shows use of 1 x 6-inch and 1 x 4-inch boards in other cases. This dimension is not called out in the Sylmar depot drawings, but scaling from the elevation drawing shows about 1 x 6-inch trim boards. These are especially important to be applied around doorways, both the freight doors and the person doors, since the Grandt doors chosen for this model do not have surrounds. I used several sizes of Evergreen styrene strip (evergreenscalemodels. com) in this project, primarily the scale 1 x 6-inch and 1 x 8-inch trim strips, but also a few other sizes, as noted in the sections below on construction and assembly.
Getting Real Column, page 5
4: My first step was to lay out the wall sections on the Evergreen styrene sheet, then “scribe and snap” each section. In this photo I am verifying the width of an end piece, at 17 scale feet, with a couple of scrap pieces in the background. The triangles from the top of the depot ends were saved to make roof formers later.
Construction I laid out wall sections on the back of the Evergreen 4083 sheet. Scribing the layout lines with a knife blade, then snapping the pieces apart, was quick and easy. Figure 4 shows the first parts, which were quite close in dimensions to what I had laid out. I laid out five pieces: two ends, a complete back wall, and the freight room and waiting room parts of the front
wall. The bay window section must be built separately. Next I laid out all the window and door openings. For this kind of task, I find a small machinist’s square to be an essential tool, Figure 5 (next page). These openings can’t be simply scribed and snapped. Instead, the outline of the opening needs to be carefully cut. I like to use an X-acto no. 2 handle (or equivalent) and its larger blade for this kind of work, along with
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