Emsingen: Freight Shed

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I talked about the Emsingen freight shed last week when I chopped off the infamous combustible goods ramp. In parallel with other projects I've been making progress on the freight shed and it's getting to the "good enough for now" state where it doesn't immediately jump out as being a mockup, nor being too detailed to make the area around it look bad.

I started off with adding some black styrene behind one of the doors. I will add a little loading scene here at a later time.

The track at the shed has a slight curve. I transferred the curve to the ramp by holding a pencil to a boxcar and mark the curve. You'll notice in the photos below that the shed and roof are square while the ramp edge has a slight curve to it. Yes, this is intentional. The idea with this shed is that the left half was originally built with the station, which is also why it matches in appearance. As freight and LCL traffic grew the shed was expanded, but this time they chose simple wood construction and just extended the building, while conforming the edge of the ramp to the curvature of the track. Yes, this is not exactly prototypical (at least I'm not aware of any prototype for such thing), but that's my story and I'm sticking to it...

I replaced the cardboard roof with 0.030 styrene sheets spray painted flat black. At the time I did this I was planning to used the Kleenex-method to make a tar paper roof and figured working from the dark base is better than working from a white base.

Scratch-building the platform supports. See the picture at the top of this post for a closer look. In the rear of the table is another freight shed project waiting. I'll get to that in due time.

The road side loading ramp has the supports that came with the station kit added. I can't quite make up my mind whether the spacing of the supports is clearly too wide or not. For now I'll leave them as is, but will likely go back and make 4 more supports for the new section later. It took me a little while to realize that the supports are beveled on 3 sides, but not the 4th, and because I didn't pay attention to that when gluing them to the ramp they look oddly angled in the photo above. I managed to make them look better on the second try.

A post in an Internet forum brought up the idea to use black craft paper instead of Kleenex for the tar paper roof. I gave that a shot since it promised to be less messy. It turned out nicely.

Some more shots of the freight shed. I planning to add rafters and lights at a later time.

For this last photo I weathered the roof using black and grey weathering powders brushed from the edge up which gives a nice streaking effect.