Loving an Elevator...

I know you lot. You'll all be expecting me to post about the construction of my T scale doodlebug given my last post on the subject. But you'd be wrong. Oh so terribly wrong.

That would be obvious.

Never do the obvious. So instead I set out to build a grain elevator.

Why a grain elevator? Well, they are pretty much an integral part of the scenery in the Midwest. If I'm going to model a Midwestern railroad scene in T scale there will have to be a grain elevator in it. Another thing is that they are pretty simple looking structures. So they have to be easy to build.

There were plenty of pictures in my new book on the M & StL Railway so, using the dimensions from a drawing in the Kalmbach book "Lineside structures for Model Railroads", I set to and started.

The great thing about working in T scale is you can't ever take everything for granted when making a structure. These things are so small (even this elevator is no more than 2" high) it often pays to look around to see it there is anything that you can use as a short cut. With this model I started out to build a shell of 5mm foam core board. Thinking that would work for the distinctive front profile. This I then covered in a paper wrapper that I printed out on the computer. It kinda, sorta works.

It kinda, sorta works. A bit more care in the assembly would help. But the walls are too flat they need some relief, some texture. Look at this wooden sided elevator in Estherville IA by way of a comparison.

So there were two courses of action open to me:

One: learn how to create that sort of texture on the paper wrapper, or;

Two: Build another one out of embossed styrene. So that is what I did.
I just happened to have some .75mm "V" groove embossed styrene that I could try as an experiment. So I built a shell out of some 1mm styrene sheet and then quickly cut some section of the embossed stuff to cover some sides to see if I liked the effect.

Which I did. It's a tad overscale to my eye. So I'm going on the look out for some .5mm embossed sheet. Which should look better. All in all, for a first serious attempt at a US outline structure it's a pretty good start. Good enough to keep me going.