Attempting my first scratchbuild

The actual CP Lambton yard office

My attempt to model it. The sign isn't properly attached yet and the roof, windows and other details are yet to come. 

Although I built a few structure kits back in the day, scratchbuilding was something I never got much chance to attempt in my first go-around in this hobby. So I thought I’d take a swing at re-creating a signature railway building that currently sits on the stretch of the CP line I’m modeling.

The building is the Lambton Yard office on Runnymede Road in west Toronto. With its combination of brick and corrugated steel in a vertical pattern, it’s not going to win any architecture awards but to me it’s a building typical of many modern railway buildings we see today.

It also backs onto a mall parking lot near the yard, which allowed me to get decent photos without trespassing on CPR property.

The building was fairly straightforward to model. I made a box of .40 styrene, then laminated that box with vertical strips of brick and steel cladding using styrene sheets, alternating the pattern of the two materials and butting them together like tiles.

I followed the techniques outlined in the book Basic Structure Modeling.

You won’t have to look to hard at the prototype pics to spot my goofs! I didn’t get the paint quite right, had trouble getting the mortar wash to flow into the mortar gaps and in compressing the building’s size (something I always intended to do) I didn’t quite get its proportions correct.

There’s still more to do of course. The roof on the prototype appears to be tar and gravel in the Bing.com rooftop pics, so I’ll try and replicate that. I thought I’d paint the roof, then pour track ballast into the wet paint and following that up with diluted glue to hold everything in place. I’ll also need some HO scale rooftop details like plumbing vents and a large air conditioner to finish it off.

I’m still trying to decide how to fill the windows. I could use clear styrene but I’m also thinking of using actual photos of the prototype windows cut to size and glued in the frames.