Workbench Witterings #24 Taking centre stage, the Westhill Road provender store

Due to other factors progress on Westhill Road is somewhat slower than I have anticipated , this is a quick post to show one of Westhill Road’s intended key buildings, the provender / perishables store.

The intention from the outset with Westhill Road is to add an element of perspective modelling to give the impression of greater depth than the physical 18″ deep baseboard.  Positioned centre stage at the front will be a provender / perishables store building and large trees that will allowing glimpses of the Westhill Road concrete wayside halt and siding through, around and behind them.

I am cheating slightly here as the provender store building I am using I built some time (actually many) years ago for a planned layout  of Hawkhurst in Kent. At the time of actually making this model the building still stood on the, now redeveloped,  old station site and I was allowed access to the site, back in the 1990s,  to take photographs of this and all the remaining at the time buildings.

Designed to keep produce such as grains, flours and animal feeds dry, cool and vermin proof these store buildings were often seen in station yards, the Southern Railway even produced its own standard concrete version at its Exmouth Junction works.

My model follows my usual methods of mainly using Wills building sheets. The main structure of the building using SSMP216  Corrugated Iron for the walls and doors, with SSMP219 Corrugated Asbestos for the roof.

With these material sheets being quite thick, I use a rat tail needle file to thin down the edges of the sheets by filing a taper within the underside corrugations to give the  impression that the sheets are a realistically thin, but in reality on the model only the viable edges are thin.
The floor is modelled using plastic sheet and the individual floor joists created using rectangular plastic section as these are clearly visible on the prototype.  The windows are made from scratch using individual pieces of micro strip plastic cut to size to make the frame. Other details such as door runners, barge boards, gutters, downpipes and supporting steelwork uprights were added from suitable plastic strip or section.

To allow airflow under the building these buildings were usually supported off the ground via columns / plinths or in the case of the building at Hawkhurst five parallel ‘honeycomb’ brick walls, essentially like Flemish bond but with each half brick ‘header’ missing.
This was to be an interesting challenge to produce the effect in 4mm scale.  Each of the walls is modelled at full depth to allow the ground levels to created around them once bedded into the layout.
Each supporting ‘honeycomb’ wall comprises of two strips of Slaters  0409 Flemish Bond embossed plasticard glued back to back taking care to ensure that the brick bond matched correctly on each side. I then created a half brick size ‘punch’ using an old fine square needle file and individually punched out each and every one of the required missing half bricks to create the ‘honeycomb’ effect. I would recommend doing this process in small doses! A wooden joist runs the length of the top of each wall on top which the perpendicular floor joists are mounted.

The provender store has been painted using enamel paints in the colours it is believed that the original at Hawkhurst was the 1940s (rather than when photographed during my visit to site).  For the asbestos roof  I stipple painted light grey / stone paint with the almost dry brush also dipped in talcum powder to give both some further surface texture and ensure a very matt finish (as adding talcum powder to any paint will create a matt finish).
The building was then suitably weathered and awaits its placement to take centre stage on Westhill Road.