Building

Today I'm having a complete change and starting to build some of the buildings I require. I made a start a long time ago with a signal box which threw up a few problems along the way. I've decided to try using John Rappards method of making wooden buildings which was photocopy the sides onto card, then assemble and paint. The signal boxes at Paekakariki were standard ones as depicted in the Guild planbooks. I did some calculations based on the quoted dimensions on the page and then reduced it on a photocopier. Checking revealed that the planbook dimensions were a bit suspect, and the plan didn't seem to scale correctly for different areas of the page in the same dimension (which is not something I've run across before using the work photocopier. Anyway, after a bit of work I finally had a set of sides and ends to work with. these were glued onto a sheet of cardboard and then put into a plastic folder.


Then grab a couple of heavy books ( I like the CRC handbook of Chemistry and Physics myself) and place them on top, so that everything dries nice and flat.
When dry you can carefully cut out the pieces. It was at this point that I realsied that there was something else wrong with the plan; The end window was on the wrong side. Fortunately there are 2 Signal boxes at Paekakariki and they are essentially mirror images, so I was going to have to reverse the plan anyway.


Here I've cut the windows and doors out so that I can add the window frames and doors out later on.