Amid some of the heart breaking events and issues that life is throwing at many of us at the moment, being able to step aside into model building can be very therapeutic. This is a quick post to show some of the progress being made on another one of Westhill Road’s key buildings, this time the Station House / booking office.
As with most of my ‘scratch building’ I still like to have in mind / ‘be inspired by’ an actual prototype, in this case I am using Alverstone, this station on the Isle of Wight (Newport Junction) Railway was later absorbed by the Isle of Wight Central Railway and subsequently the Southern Railway. Whilst I am building it as a mirror image I am keeping its quirky characteristics including: the tiny booking office being part of the station masters house, the brick lower and rendered upper walls and the interesting roof line with hips and gables.
Being old school, no CAD or 3D printing malarkey here yet, using prototype images I create a series of quick sketches / plans on the trusty A3 graph pad to work out, to scale, all elevations and interior arrangement (with a little help from my Dad who worked most of his career in the building trade, thanks Dad!).
As one the features of Westhill Road is to introduce an element of perspective modelling as the overall layout depth is 18inches, I have purposely compressed the size of the Station House / booking office a little to help with the effect once its position behind the LSWR Type 3B ground signal Box and small tin tabernacle chapel becomes clear.
As with all the buildings, I propose where possible to include interior details and lighting (I will utilise the central chimney to hide the lighting wires). The next stage is cutting the windows in the upper rendered wall sections (Wills building material as are the brick lower walls) along with making from scratch the upper windows and creating the bathroom and bedrooms, so watch this space.
That’s great Graham , I was hoping you would be at Wycrail this year but sadly it’s cancelled.
Great to read you are using Station House, Alverstone to model your station. My dear friend owns and lives at Station House, Alverstone, Isle of Wight. It is very quirky, in particular, the floor slopes from the dining room into the kitchen. Think of Titanic and you get the idea.