Monday, August 19, 2013

Emsingen station interior, part 4

And you thought I would let you off easy, did you ... ?

Just as I suspected, when I put a light bulb inside the station building and turned off the work bench lights, the building walls started to glow:


Yeah, that's really not cool. This is not a scene from a ghost story. The wall on the left got some thick sheet styrene on the inside, which helps, but isn't perfect. The wall on right is not fixed yet, neither is the door. 


The baggage / express freight room after installing a screen of black construction paper inside, which then gets covered up with a thin sheet of white styrene.


The station office.


And the fixed waiting room. The doors are impossible to fix properly at this stage. Before installation I should have painted them black on the inside to reduce the sheen. The wall on the right is covered with construction paper, the one on the left with just sheet styrene. Paper wins.

The last three photos are exposed for 3 secs with 5.6 aperture. I used an LED flash light to briefly light up the walls and simulate some moonlight. No digital editing done.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Busy time in Emsingen


The transfer run from Emsingen to Talheim is extra long today. The Talheim switcher will have some work to do...

Emsingen station interior, part 3

It's done.

Station office and baggage / express department
Waiting room now with passengers
Tonight I built the luggage department. The shelves are made from styrene, and the boxes / bags are cut from some balsa wood strip. Putting it together isn't really that hard, but it took forever.

I updated the waiting room with the arrival and departure information (thanks for the idea, Wolfram), as well as waiting passengers. This is the first time that I painted figures this small myself. The paint looks appropriately clumsy. However, when they are behind glass inside the building you can't quite see all my mistakes, so it's acceptable. I'll get some more practice when I paint the remaining 40 sitting passengers in the package...

The rooms are now permanently installed in the station building, the light mask is adjusted and cut out ... and I have this nagging feeling that I'm not done with this topic yet.

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Emsingen station interior, part 2

I was encouraged by the success of the waiting room, and continued to build rooms behind the track-facing window front. Next up was the station office, which also houses the ticket counter.

Hey, look! There are papers and folders on the desk.

What I found interesting is that it doesn't take much details to suggest a room behind the windows.  I'm likely going to add a Preiserlein somewhere in the office to make it look more "lived in".


Now I only have the express shipment and luggage department left to do before I can return to the regular construction of the station building.

I'll leave the top of the rooms open, and place the bulbs for general building lighting high enough, so that they illuminate the decorated interior spaces as well.

Friday, August 09, 2013

Sunday, August 04, 2013

Emsingen station interior

When I got to the step to install the interior paper mask of the Emsingen station building, I realized that all the first floor windows have "closed" grey curtains. Urgh. Not how I envisioned this. Over the last couple days I looked at dozens of floor plans of station buildings from around the late 1900's. Baden-Wuerttemberg's Staatsarchiv in Ludwigsburg is a treasure trove of such plans. A surprising number of plans is available on their Web site. While the navigation is sub-optimal, the information is awesome. 

Anyways, I learned that most small to medium stations typically have the following rooms on the ground floor level:
- Eingangs-/Schalterhalle (entry hall, ticket counter)
- Warteraum (waiting room, sometimes separate rooms for passengers travelling 1st or 2nd class)
- Gepa (Gepaeckaufgabe, i.e. luggage services)
- Dienstraum / Fahrdienstleiter, Stationsbuero (official railroad business rooms, typically the ticket counter would be on the wall between this room and the entry hall)
- Toiletten (rest rooms)

Depending on the building passengers access the platform through the waiting room, or a hallway from the entry hall.

Tonight I decided to try and build a waiting room.

The walls and floor are made from sheet styrene. The benches are survivors from my Dad's layout, as is the sign. The door in the corner is left-over from another kit. The floor is painted. I intentionally left the brush marks to make it look a bit more used. I added the vertical "wood beams" to give the walls a bit more structure.


The waiting room is in the left corner of the station building facing the operators. If I go through all this trouble at least I want to be able to see it, too.


View from the outside. It's subtle for now, though I think it'll look really nice once I add interior lighting, and add a few waiting passengers. By the way, this is the wall that was missing in the Testing pictures from last week.

Time to think about how to arrange the Dienstraum and Gepa.