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With the addition of a hip roof, the Atlas HO model makes a good stand-in for the Rut- land’s depot at Bartonsville, Vermont (left). The underside of the Atlas depot (page 52, bottom and above) reveals the work done to replace the roof. A new styrene ceiling was cut and glued onto the walls. The roofing panels extend out over the walls to achieve the desired overhang. The kit’s support brackets were cut and sanded to fit the new roof.


major railroad construction and expan- sion. Many earlier depots were replaced with up-to-date Queen Anne versions, which remained as there was little im- petus to replace them later. So many railroad depots, signal cabins, crossing shanties, etc., were built to this style that some try to characterize it as “Railroad Architecture.” It wasn’t any- thing separate but part and parcel of contemporary architecture and should be understood as such. It had such in- fluence on railroad structures you could simply call everything Queen Anne and get it right most of the time. The Ruskinian approach to decora- tion meant that a frame structure, for instance, might have sections with ver- tical siding and others horizontal, or some areas of shingles, all separated by strip members to give a sort of half timber Tudor look. This is where the almost universal depot wainscoting comes from.


Another common but far from uni- versal Queen Anne feature was the hip roof with about a 30-degree pitch. (The term “hip” comes from a source mean- ing “bend,” but hip was also a version of “hump” as it applied to this roof style.) I have seen a number of depots built to an earlier style but later mod- ernized with a hip roof. This single fea- ture is enough to make any such re-


RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN


built station appear as a typical Queen Anne one. The depots in Chateaugay, New York, and Ludlow, Vermont, are two that come to mind. From a model- ing standpoint, our higher level view of a layout makes the roof even that much more important. We can use that to make changes to otherwise overly- familiar station models so they can look unique to ours, and at the same time make each kitbash that much more typical of prototype depots. I’m not sure where Atlas got their in- spiration for their depot model. The use of a steeper roof and a number of small dormers, particularly for such a small station, makes the kit easy to identify. I think just about every mod- eler has had this kit at one time or an- other. The Rutland had a standard small depot design used at many loca- tions, including at Bartonsville, Ver- mont. Bethlehem Car Works/Rutland Car Shops now has a cast resin kit for this specific standard, but when we needed a depot for the Bartonsville scene on the RPI Club layout, we got impatient. While we waited for one of our members to build the Bethlehem kit, we threw together a simple but re- warding kitbash of the Atlas depot. All it took was replacing the ornate Atlas roof with a simple 30-degree hip roof.


Walther’s wooden interlocking tower kit (above) comes with a shallow hip roof. In this scene at Troy, New York, which is under construction, the kit has had its first floor cov- ered/overlaid with brick and has a 30-degree hip roof to create a different appearance.


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