Page 26 - NMRA Roundhouse September-October 2019
P. 26

 Kitbashing a Small Packing Shed
Alain Kap MMR
  Photos by Alain Kap MMR
MODELLING ARTICLE
S
for suitable kits but cannot find the right one. Recently I browsed my collection of “modeling ideas” and found an arti-
cle from the July 1987 issue of Model Railroader about a fruit-packing shed located in Lodi, California.The shape
of the shed immediately reminded me of a kit by Heljan from Denmark (item #1766) with a similar arrangement to the shortened version of the original fruit packing shed in Lodi.
The local grape grower, Harl M.Young, built it in 1941 as a shipping centre.
The 216 x 16 feet long narrow facility received grapes from the vineyards by truck, which were then trans-loaded into refrigerator cars.The Southern Pacific railroad handled the cars from H.MYoung and other local companies in town.The timber structure is composed of 24-foot bays with a covered platform and a shed with office and lavatory on one end. A spur track goes along one side. The opposite side is where the truck loading bays are located with 6 x 8 inch bumpers to protect the wood- en structure. At the peak of the grape growing season, the packing shed loaded five to ten freight cars a day.
 ometimes you are in need of a particular building that fits in some odd space on your layout. You browse catalogues
Out
of the
box, the
model features
a wooden plat-
form with timber roof
supports and a wooden shed
at one end like the prototype, it
also has two loading bays on the trackside and a loading door and office door on the truck side.The footprint is
8 1/4” x 2 3/4” which makes the mod-
el roughly one third of the prototype length but four feet wider.The shed/ office represents half of the overall size with three bents in the covered open platform. which is molded in one piece with a planked surface.The sides of the platform are plain with an overhang.The loading height of the platform is missing one and a half scale feet, so this lends it- self for some upgrading and adding posts and planks to the sides. On the proto- type there was also a free standing bent with roof for truck unloading. Using the model as a base, upgrading and modifica- tion was easy.
First, I laid all the kit parts out and
checked which parts
needed to be dressed
up, modified or simply
discarded. The most obvious part
to be altered was the roof. The model has a ridge
ventilation and the prototype has not.The shed walls have boarded sid-
ing. On the original shed, the walls and the roof were covered with corrugated metal sheets.
The roof consists of two halves, with the opening for the ridge ventilation.To meet the prototype I had to cover the roof with corrugated siding anyway, so the opening for the ventilation would disappear. I glued the roof halves togeth- er using the bents as a guide. Finally, I made a ridge cap from styrene strip.
I mentioned earlier that the platform is 18 scale inches too low, so I remedied this first.The sides are plain and the
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