Friday, March 04, 2016

Hallelujah Papermill: Power Station Building Inside


I stopped by The Train Shop today, ran into a couple well-known local model railroaders, and picked up the interiors kit for the Northern Light & Power kit, which I'm using to represent the paper mill power station. The interiors kit is a bit of a joke: two sprues, the majority of which are taken up by the three panels for the steam boiler. I originally planned to build up something on the inside myself, but saw the box on the shelf and figured, "Why not? Let's try it." Oh well, ... Let's see what we can make with this.

The grey plastic pieces first got a light coat of Coach Green mixed with a bit of yellow, which becomes this ubiquitous machine green commonly seen in industrial settings. An application of weathering powders later we have something that looks a bit more interesting.


Next I painted one of the sprues silver and arranged the "pipes" around the boiler set. The effect behind the windows of the building is much better in 3D than in the photo below but you get the idea. Now we're no longer looking at a boring grey box with some ribs.


I found the crane bridge under layout and built a new hoist housing from strip styrene. The housing doesn't have to be particularly pretty or accurate since it's hard to see from the outside of the building anyways. As long as there's something "there", the effect is sufficient.


I painted the turbines and generator parts and added a dusting of weathering powder to represent grease and grime. I did add tiny representations of builder plates made from 0.010' strip styrene painted black.

Here's an overview of the completed interior. The boiler walls are a bit crooked because I glued the separating wall the wrong way around, and now the sliding fire doors get in the way of the boiler walls.



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