The Cheltenham granary
back burner while more pressing and easier structures occupied my time. However, I’m friends with a number of members of the S Scale Workshop (see the May, 2008, RMC), and with an invitation to build a module and join the fun it was only a matter of time before I gave 1:64 a try. The Workshop models the Canadian National in southern On- tario in the 1950’s, coincidentally the same subject covered by Ian’s books. So, I turned to my library for module ideas, and when I reached the photo of the grain building I knew I had my candi- date. Building this structure in S would give me a feel for the scale and give me a focal point for my future module. I e-mailed Gerry at Mt. Albert Scale Lumber and placed an order for a lot of S scale 2″×8″ stripwood. While Gerry cut the order, I figured out how I was go- ing to tackle this simple yet demanding project.
Those 840 pieces The walls have three finishes: a rub- ble stone foundation, walls built from stacked boards, and corrugated metal peaks on the end walls. I decided each treatment would have to be dealt with separately during construction, and that the wood walls were the place to start. I exchanged e-mails with fellow RMC author Doug Harding who lives in Iowa and knows things about grain buildings. Doug informed me that the walls are of “cribbed wood” construction. It’s similar to a furniture-building technique called finger joint, which makes sense given that the ends are interleaved like the fin- gers of clasped hands. See the sidebar. With the corrugated sheets used on the peaks, it’s likely the prototype struc- ture’s walls were completely metal-clad at one point. Perhaps the cladding had been removed in preparation for the ap-
In the early 1950’s, Cheltenham’s lovely, compact combination station sat next to the grain building. Plans for the depot appeared in Hamilton’s Other Railway,by Charles Cooper.
plication of fresh siding. Given that the prototype photo that inspired me showed an overgrown siding in front of the building, it may be that the struc- ture was no longer in service (perhaps even about to be dismantled) and the siding had been removed for use else- where. If so, then the photographer got lucky, capturing a rare photo of a grain building in its foundation garments, and that’s how I would model it.
I worked from photographs and esti- mated the structure at 30 feet by 40 feet, with 12-foot high wooden walls made from 10-foot lengths of 2″×8″ lumber. (I later found a reference in Hamilton’s Other Railway, by Charles Cooper, to the boards being 2″×4″ by eight feet, so this is one of the hobby’s rare examples of selective expansion rather than compression.)
I started by setting up my cutter and reducing a fistful of S scale 2″×8″ stock into ten-foot lengths. I didn’t know how much I would need. In theory, the structure would require six 2″-thick boards per foot of wall, 72 boards high per side, but of course the model boards would swell a bit when stained. In the end, each panel has 60 pieces of lumber, so there are 840 boards in the walls. I divided the wood into five piles of
random sizes. I left the smallest pile untreated, but swirled the rest in four different concentrations of india ink in rubbing alcohol before spreading them out to dry. When I was ready to build the walls, I mixed the boards together and pulled boards from the pile to cre- ate the model’s random wall pattern. One challenge would be keeping the walls straight during construction. To
Working from a vintage photograph in a book by Ian Wilson (left), the model building was begun by cutting stripwood to build the cribbed wood walls. In all, the walls required 840 ten-foot lengths of wood. The wood was pre-stained (right) and dried in batches,
56
then mixed together. The boards were pulled at random to make sure the board colors were mixed, then the walls were built up board by board with the wood edges glued to a thin styrene sheet sub-wall on a glass surface. This minimized any warping.
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