Window glazing for a tender’s dog house
A simple way to improve the appearance of a tender’s dog house/Tom Troughton
PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR
Some railroads installed small shelters, often refered to as dog houses, on their tenders where the head brakemen could ride and stay protected from inclement weather. The author’s Sn3 Cimar-
H
ave you ever encountered this kind of situation? You are enter- ing the final stages of preparing a newly-acquired brass steam engine for your layout. The engine and tender have been painted, lights installed and the cab windows are in place, but you have hit a stone wall wondering how you are going to install glazing in the brakeman’s dog house that’s soldered to the top of the tender. There’s no easy way to reach its interior.
I had that problem recently after painting and reassembling a PBL K-37 brass locomotive. The engine cab could be unscrewed and removed from the frame, granting easy access to the inte- rior walls to brush paint them and in- stall acetate window glazing. While many modelers prefer working with the ultra-thin pieces of glass available from laboratory suppliers as well as hobby and craft suppliers that cater to
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ron & Tall Timbers K-37 tender features a dog house. The acetate glazing used for both the engine cab and the tender dog house windows was attached with carefully applied Future Floor Wax.
scratchbuilders, I’ve never been suc- cessful cutting the thin glass pieces. I have resorted to using the thin clear pieces of acetate left over on the glaz- ing sheets of the laser-cut windows that come in structure kits.
While I had used it for glazing flat, easy-to-reach windows in wooden buildings and the windows of an en- gine cab, I was stymied when it came to installing the acetate in the three windows of the dog house sitting atop the tender tank. The dog house on this particular series of PBL engines was soldered in place, making access to the interior through the base virtually im- possible. I was ready to put the engine on the layout without the glazing when I started thinking about the tech- niques modelers who build ships in bottles might employ. I started with a piece of acetate about ¹₈″ larger than the overall win-
dow opening. To get an accurate meas- urement I used the pointed prongs on a set of calipers, the ones used to meas- ure inside dimensions, for both the height and width. After the acetate was cut from the scrap window materi- al sheet, the points were set back into the window opening and carefully pressed against its edges to get an ac- curate dimension for the width. Then, I carefully positioned the points over the acetate and lightly pressed down into it to make tiny dimples or impressions that were about ¹₁₆″ in from the edge and centered. The pointed end of a den- tal explorer was used to carefully punch through the impressions to cre- ate a very tiny hole.
Looking through my scrap box of thin, flexible wire, I found a short piece of wire that came from a Miniatronics 1.5-volt bulb. A single strand turned out to be about .003″ in diameter; I thought it
JANUARY 2014
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