Canadian Pacific section house Scratchbuilding this standard-plan, traditional-era structure/Mike Chandler S
ection houses were once common- ly found along nearly every rail- road line. As transcontinental railroads built into Western Canada, they frequently crossed unsettled terri- tory and therefore found it necessary to provide living accommodations for their employees, particularly those lo- cated at intermediate points along the line. As a result, most stations had sec- ond floor living quarters for the agent/operator’s family and, similarly, the section foreman and his family were provided with a section house. In the days of manual labor, track mainte- nance sections tended to be rather short, typically in the range of seven miles. Since nearly every section had a section house, they became one of the most numerous structures on the rail- road scene. Canadian Pacific had several stan- dardized designs for section houses, and plans for their No. 4 design, one of their larger houses, were published in the December, 1982, RMC. However, the subject of this article is CP’s small- er, No. 3 section house. Apparently, the initial design was found to be too small. Nearly all section houses built to this design received a lean-to addi- tion on the back wall in order to pro- vide for an enlarged kitchen. Although the original structure was a standard design, the additions were not. As a re- sult, there was considerable variation among these structures with some even having the kitchen addition on the building’s side. Less common was the addition of a vestibule entrance on the side door, al- ways an asset on cold winter days. With all this in mind, I decided against modeling any one specific prototype for my layout, and instead developed a typical modified No. 3 design with a vestibule entrance. I had wanted to build this common- place structure for some time but lacked sufficient information on the prototypes, which are largely no longer in existence. However, this all changed thanks to Anthony Craig who provided his excellent field notes, made when many of CP’s No. 3 section houses were still in existence. With this information in hand, I no longer had a reason not to build the model.
Although my section house was built in HO scale, the drawings give measure- ments in full size dimensions for con- venience in converting to other scales.
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PHOTOS BY MIKE CHANDLER
My usual construction technique is to use Strathmore®
board, a type of bristol
card obtained in artists’ supply stores. For this project, I used Strathmore in one, two, and four-ply thicknesses; it is
struction, I find Strathmore to be an ex- cellent material to work with, but its best asset is being able to lay the walls out in one piece with a T-square and di- viders on a drafting board. Although I
MIKE CHANDLER: COQUIHALLA, B.C., CANADA
By August 22, 1964, Canadian Pacific’s legendary Coquihalla subdivision had been aban- doned for a few years but some buildings remained. These included a 40,000-gallon en- closed water tower and a No. 3 section house at Coquihalla, British Columbia, summit and namesake of the subdivision. In another of the many variants of this standard plan, this one was built in the mirror image of the standard design. Starting in the late 1940’s, most sec- tion houses had their wood sheathing covered with brick patterned tarpaper (“insulbrick”).
sold in 22″×30″ sheets. Obviously, each sheet is sufficient to provide material for several HO structures comparable in size to a section house. For ease of con-
will describe this project with Strath- more in mind, you may substitute styrene or wood should that be your pre- ferred medium.
NOVEMBER 2012
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