Appalachian Southern

Here is what I have done so far with my  first scratch building effort. I don’t have any weathering done yet, just a little painting. I realized today that I needed decal printing stock, so I ordered that. I also need to pick up some India Ink so I can do some weathering. With a little touch up painting here and there, I think the results are great for my first attempt. I actually built the building twice to improve on some mistakes I made earlier with the first version.  The original build article, with instructions, can be found here at N Scale Limited.

Sinclair Station Version 2

Sinclair Station Version 2

Sinclair Station Version 2

Sinclair Station Version 2

Today I am working on scratch building my very first structure. Thanks to Chris Brimley at N Scale Limited for the encouragement to start. His article, Scratch Building Sinclair Station, is the guide I am using for this project. It is a welcome reprieve from laying track for the past week.

In the article, Chris is kind enough to provide a shopping list of all the Evergreen styrene products you will need along with a few other miscellaneous parts to complete the build. I ended up ordering the styrene and windows from Chuck at Feather River and the metal siding directly from the manufacturer. All the materials arrived in short order, and here I am building away.

Chris also supplied scale AutoCad drawings in JPEG format on his website for the structure. My calculator is getting a workout doing the n scale factor conversion.  The elevation drawings help remove the guesswork when selecting the appropriate styrene sizes. The door assemblies on the front of the structure will provide the biggest challenge for this project and will take the longest amount of time to complete.

I am looking forward to getting to the point where I can being applying some paint. I am going to try to do all the painting with my airbrush, including the weathering.  The vented paint booth I installed about a month needs its first workout. It will be nice not to have over spray settling all over everything in the room.

I don’t really have any pictures to show at this point as the final assembly has not commenced. Right now all the parts are just flat pieces of styrene with window openings.

I have to admit I have lived in my cave for too long. Not long ago, I considered an online forum to be the only useful resource for N scale related projects and ideas.  Once Appalachian Southern came into existence a few months ago, I began to realize that there was a wealth of information available on the internet that I had simply overlooked.

One perfect example is N Scale Limited. With a beautiful website layout and quality content, be sure not to miss all the interesting material you can find there.  Chris Brimley, one of the founders, is a source of some great scratch building ideas.  One in particular caught my attention; entitled Scratch Building 101: Sinclair Station.   I am not exactly a scratch builder of anything except bench work Not only does Chris provided detailed step by step instructions, but he provides detailed research and history regarding the prototype. Very interesting indeed. Great work!

Hopefully this article will help me break into the art of  scratch building structures for my layout. It is likely that I will need a few hundred structures, and it seems most manufacturers aren’t concerned with modern era diesel layouts.

So, today I am going to order the parts and I will keep you updated on my progress. This looks to be a fun project.