Page 15 - March April 2017

Scratchbuilding is fun. You can model any prototype structure you want. Or you can let your imagination run wild and create your own fantasy world. Imagine building Garrison Keillor’s beloved fictitious town of Lake Wobegon from the picture Keillor paints in your mind when he writes.
The railroad took its sweet time arriving.... Bribes were paid to railroad officials, of course, but other towns paid bigger ones. The handsome depot built to lure the lines sat empty and its platform opened onto a field of alfalfa where a tiny sign on a pole stood, which said ‘W.’...
The ultimate connection of the town, in 1885, with the so-called ‘Lake Wobegon spur,’ was a mistake on the railroad’s part, a siding that took a sharp angle due to misplaced surveyors’ stakes and that kept going for sixteen miles in an attempt to find its way back to the main line. When the track crew reached... (what) was now called Lake Wobegon, they simply stopped... leaving the track where it is today, a quarter-mile south of town, ending in thick brush by the depot. (The depot was moved south on skids to reach the end of the line.) A district superintendent was fired for his negligence.... Passenger service was always by petition, fifty names being required due to the inconvenience of the stop (trains having to back in the full distance)....
Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days (London, 1986), 56-57.
By scratchbuilding you will never have to wait for that special kit to be produced. There’s no problem about kits being too expensive or no longer being available. By not relying on kits, you can create just what you want when you want and make it fit your ideas, your layout and your budget. Scratchbuilding structures can help make even the most complex structure affordable by enabling you to build it bit by bit, stage by stage as your budget allows - just like in the real world!
What do you need to start?
The first thing is to have an idea of what you’d like to model.
In my case it was simple - I wanted to model the area around where I’d grown up on the Pennsylvania/Maryland border (the Mason- Dixon line that was the imaginary divide between North and South in the American Civil War). I had some photos I’d taken as well as two measured drawings I’d done of two Western Maryland Railroad buildings - the Highfield train order office and Waynesboro freight station. I was keen to start my first two scratchbuilt buildings.
One lesson I learned from building them is that I didn’t have all the information I would really have liked before starting to build them. But then that’s just the kind of thing I find out in each project I tackle.
This naturally leads to the second lesson - the 'good enough' factor or the art of compromise. I like the idea of the ‘good enough factor’. After all you can always come back and rebuild bits (or all) of models. In the case of Highfield, I took the roof off to glaze the windows which I foolishly hadn’t thought to do the first time round. A few years later I had my first trip back to the States in 22 years. As a result I rebuilt the back wall and put in some internal walls.
Which brings to mind the third lesson. I was so excited to be at Highfield and to hang out just where I did all those years before that I didn’t take the opportunity to measure and photograph all that I could have. Nowadays I make a checklist of what I want to record well in advance and keep it for reference.
If you don’t have a specific prototype or location in mind where do you start? Railroad historical societies publish a lot of really good information. And, of course, the internet gives one astounding resources of photographs, maps, aerial photos and almost unlimited information.
My favourite source of ideas is working from old photographs and maps. That feeling that you just have to build it when you see the photograph of it for the first time - the crazy Swiss chalet look of Edgemont station made it an absolute must, just as the structural gymnastics of the High Rock observation decks called out ‘model me’.
Western Maryland Railway station at Edgemont, MD c1915. © Western Maryland Railway Historical Society
And, of course that is the fourth lesson – you really need to want to model a particular building or structure to make building a model of it really enjoyable. In my case, one of the things I decided early on is to check to see that buildings I choose to model look American and can’t be mistaken for being anything other than American. Scratchbuilding was the answer.
Working from old photographs and maps
I get a real buzz from tracking down old photographs and maps to further my model building. A good example is the Waynesboro Railway Express Agency depot. In this case I only had one 1962 photo showing the south elevation of the depot and, in the mid- distance, what I then knew as a gas station. It took me about eight years to find the remaining series of photos (some dating back to the early 1900s). These enabled me to understand what the depot had looked like originally and how it had changed over the years. In addition, I also found that the ‘gas station’ had earlier been the depot of the Cumberland Valley Railroad (later the Pennsylvania Railroad).
Finding all the photos was the first step. The next thing I needed to do was to prepare scale drawings. My first attempt at this was based on the width of doors and windows being either 2 feet 3 inches or 2 feet 6 inches.
But I was having trouble getting the overall proportions to look right. Luckily I happened to go to a lecture on early American timber building techniques. This introduced me to the measurement of 5 1⁄2 yards. From the photos I prepared scale