Elmer Lane 4 - Roundhouse wall

 DB just couldn't resist...

The Elmer Lane roundhouse was pretty cool, alas I only got to see it in its truncated 4-stall edition in the early 80s. Despite owning no steam locos, my Elmer Lane will be late 60s at the turntable end (full roundhouse, sand tower, water vat, light-up wood etc),  and diesel focused at the arrival end (plain sidings to park pairs of locos). 

The roundhouse is obviously the first thing to tackle, especially as I was looking at the site of the real thing on Thursday.

I picked up a few sheets of A4 acetate overhead projector film recently and started playing in Excel, forming some 4x8 panes, using 'double outlines' on each cell. These were copied and pasted along and scaled by trial and error (printing on ordinary paper). When I had these about the right size they were printed out on the acetate. 

My plan below is a little underscale, maybe an inch or so short in horizontal length, but I need to build a little tall, as the locos still have to fit through the doors! I will hide the bottom 5mm with ballast.

I did the same excel/acetate thing for the back walls, although with the Kato turntable legs splayed a little wider than the real thing, each of my wall segments will be a little wider. 

Here is the printout with some indicative side shapes drawn in with a fine marker.

Stripwood was procured from Mitre 10 in various sizes for supports. Some was painted/stained dark grey and some strip plastic for the window frames painted a reddy-brown shade. These were hung out to dry.

After spraying a reject printout with Dullcote once on the front and once on the back as a test, I decided spraying the backside/inside was better, this provides a slightly opaque/dirty look to the windows, but leaves the laser printed panes on the outside. 

The real roundhouse had corrugated metal on the sides and rear walls with massive metal casement windows. The curved side facing the turntable was wood, and the roof a malthoidy thing. 

I have some corrugated plasticard, a little coarse, bit it will do. Oddly it was prepainted the right shade of browny black, I think from some containers may moons ago. A windowsill of my painted stripwood was added on top.

This was glued on successfully with a big honkin tube of Ados contact glue. being careful not to get any on the window glass. Interior beams will provide stiffening, so these were cut to length: 

And glued to the inside:

Additional reinforcing top and bottom on the inside:

Prepainted reddy strip window framing adorns the outside, very carefully glued, hiding the beams:

And the top corrugated piece added:

The top black bit looks a little tall above the windows in the above pic compared to the protype picture from "Steam Inclined", but there is a fairly deep roof fascia that will hang down and cover this, and as mentioned the lower 5mm will be hidden in ballast.