When one door closes....

[doctorwayne]

....another one takes its place.

For a long time, I've not been pleased by the end walls of the shop supply track of the Lowbanks Shops. (I'm not sure exactly how long, but I got the Vollmer roundhouse kit, from which the Lowbanks loco shop was built, in 1969, and built it as-intended. It was later torn apart to construct the shop building shown in the first photo). While the doors were operable, they opened inward, but what bothered me most was their wood construction (basswood sheeting scribed with random-width planks) and the fact that the shed-type gables they supported were supposed to represent brick. Not only is this a structural faux pas, hock: but even worse, it's æsthetically displeasing.



I found some of the left-over walls from the original roundhouse and decided to correct that problem, and at the same time, fix a couple of other items. Here's one of the "new" walls, scribed to be cut and set in place:



And with the cuts complete:



I removed the old interior bracing (.125"x.125" basswood strips) and added similar-sized strip styrene as bracing and gluing surfaces:



Here's the front doors made-up from Evergreen .030" thick "O" scale passenger car siding. The bracing is .010"x.040" and .010"x.060" strip styrene. Because the doors are so thin, the pivot-type hinges (barely visible at the bottom of the doors) are .015" music wire. Door jambs and lintels are built-up from Evergreen strip and structural shapes, roughly mimicking the style used on the original roundhouse:



Here's the finished wall and doors in place. The back end of this area got the same treatment:



I also added steel posts (.080" styrene rod) with hooks (.015" piano wire) to which the doors can be attached when open, to prevent them flapping in the wind. The loop and eye assemblies on the doors were built from .012" brass wire, soldered together, then blackened:



All of the original roundhouse doors got the same treatment:



As you can see in this view, I replaced the original door on the lean-to with a more suitably-sized one, and added a few windows, too:



The final alteration was to the shop floor. The main part of the structure had brick paper over balsa sheet flooring, while the shop supply track's floor was Holgate & Reynolds embossed vinyl brick, also over balsa. The main problem was that the floor was too thick (by the thickness of the brick paper in the main area of the building and by that of the H&R sheet in the supply annex). Once enough of a locomotive's wheels were within the shop, they were lifted just far enough off the track to lose electrical contact.



Using a straightedge and a sharp blade, the offending material was trimmed back by a couple of brick-widths, then the exposed balsa painted with a similar colour. With the roof in-place, the missing detail is unnoticeable, and the need for the trusty 0-5-0 to drag a dead loco out by its coupler has been eliminated.

Wayne