Diesel House

 Amongst the many projects there are to do is the need for a diesel loco shed. This will be situated on the left hand side of the room and sit mid way down in the loco area. Room for the shed is tight and it will sit against the main line track that is next to the passenger platform.

Location of diesel shed

Pictures of diesel sheds were hard to find, so the best compromise was to just freelance the shed to look like one. While trawling through Ebay one day I came across a shed that had potential. It was reasonably cheap and one of those items 'postage free' from China. (If only items from the states were as cheap!) The kit had the usual four walls, a flat roof and floor. There were sprues that fitted suitable equivalent holes to make it all rigid. In the end none of these were used.

As other things with the layout progressed the loco shed project was put aside. Then I got the package with the parts out again. There were no instructions or photos, just the parts in a plastic bag. I was fairly straight forward anyway. I did a dry run with the parts on the layout and quickly realised that what I had on hand would only make half a shed, so another kit was ordered and turned up some time later.

So when it was time to get serious the parts were taken out of their respective bags and one seemed smaller than the other. The penny quickly dropped and I realised either I was sent an N scale kit or I had ticked the wrong box when ordering. A period of many months had elapsed and although I could have re-ordered a second HO kit I felt that using the N scale one, some interesting mods would have to be made. The other issue was that the windows would be smaller, but side by side they seemed to work out Okay.

Ex station roof

The hunt was on for a suitable roof. Worse case scenario was to manufacture a flat roof which should have been easy to make. But a visit to the Forestville Model rail exhibition led me straight to the second hand section. Getting in there on a Saturday meant a slow trip into the narrow room to look for bargains. At times you couldn't even see the tables due to a wall of bodies doing the same bargain hunting. Way down the back of the room was where there was some sort of order and the 'other than locos and rolling stock' section was. As it was two hours in after opening I didn't expect to see much suitable but then I spotted some type of european station roofing complete with the supports. When you are into scratch building you have to quickly determine if you can do something with it. So with this item I could see that the roof looked a good possibility. The were skylights in the roof which would let light into the shed. Maybe this style wouldn't work in real life but I thought it would work for me. Can't complain, it only cost $10 for the station roof.

The shed is fairly small being 400m long and 125mm wide. This covered two tracks and will provide coverage for four locos around the size of 44, 45 etc style locos. It would not give coverage for two NR type locos completely on the same track. The design is mainly to give the appearance of infrastructure to house a few locos. I am not sure what will be provided inside the shed at this stage. To match the size of the shed I had to cut down the length and width of the platform roofing. It sorta came out OK. To fit the walls onto the roof section I glued an L angle evergreen strip along the base of the roof. This also formed a gutter and tidied up the edging and made it look a lot neater. This can be seen in the roof photo above. Naturally a second section had to be added as the sections out of the bag are not long enough.

Whoops N scale

The above photo shows how the N scale sections were infilled with HO scale corrugated section to match the height of the correct HO sections. I think it gives some variety to the shed. The kit for the shed was actually for three tracks wide but the front had to be modified in width to only cover two tracks. The other issue was that the doorways had to be enlarged to HO scale.

Loco shed in its selected place.

Something missing?

The above photos shows the basics of the shed. It just requires the back section added and some more detailing, painting, weathering etc. I'll show that on the next blog update.