Building the Roundhouse - Final Version

In my last post I wrote about receiving the first resin castings from Mike Rebeiro and discovering that they were too small.  After rechecking the dimensions on the HABS/HAER drawings in the Library of Congress, as well as drawings on pages 212-213 of Along the East Broad Top by Donald J. Heimburger (Heimburger House Publishing Company: River Forest, 1987), Mike laser cut a new set of molds for the walls and details.  Several weeks later, I received photos of an assembled and painted model of the roundhouse mounted on a sheet of foam core board.  It was magnificent!  It was also very large!

I was especially impressed with the realism of the roll down doors.  I had found a few styrene roll down doors in my scrap box that I picked up at a train show some years ago.  Mike make a mold from one of these doors and produced a door that was an exact fit.  Even more amazing was the level of realism he achieved by painting the doors.

Compare this photo with one I took recently of the roll down doors on the prototype.

I was surprised to learn that Mike had achieved this effect with just two bottles of paint: Polly Scale Stainless Steel and an inexpensive acrylic called Country Red, available from any craft store.

Needless to say, I was delighted.  With the trees in the background, it almost looked like the real thing.  A few days later, Mike arrived at my front door carrying the roundhouse, still on the same piece of foam core.  The level of detail was amazing.

I invited Mike to the train room, where we gently placed the structure on the layout, in approximately the position it would occupy when completed.

The roundhouse will set at one end of the EBT shop complex in Rockhill Furnace.  I cut a piece of paper using a compass to draw a scale 65 foot circle, so I could visualize where the turntable would go.  Of course, I had to see what it looked like with some of the EBT's motive power in the stalls.

Note that the structure does not have a roof yet.  Mike provided me with a set of templates for the front and rear roof sections, as well as the roof vents.  The saga of the roof will be told later.

I decided on how the roundhouse would be oriented.  My layout sits on slabs of 2 inch foam insulation. Once I knew where the structure and turntable fit, I determined how large a piece of foam would be needed to support it.  I cut a 26 x 28 square of insulation, which was just big enough to fit the roundhouse itself, not including the garage/shed that is attached to the right side.  I figured that once the roundhouse was ready, I would cut a 26 x 28 inch hole and drop in the basic structure and turntable as a single unit.  The garage is separate, and will be tucked up against the building after it is in place.

In my next post, I will describe how I mounted the roundhouse on its foam base with a layer of 1/8 inch cork on top.  The cork layer will play a very important role in the installation.  I will also return to the question of the roof and how I decided to construct it in two easily removable pieces to allow for viewing and servicing the building in place.  Future posts will focus on internal lighting using surface mounted LEDs suspended from the rafters, and on the construction and installation of the turntable.