Wednesday, 15 January 2014

Station Building Reflections

Most of the station buildings on the North Cornwall line have a distinctive common design and I was keen that St Petrock should have it too.  The old station building in Padstow still survives, so a few years ago I measured it.  "We do this every few years to see if it's shrunk," I explained to a group of bemused emmets.

I made a good start at building a model in plastic card, but the project was put on hold while we moved house (twice in 2012).  When peace finally returned and work started on St Petrock, I decided that a brick built version would be better, as it would match my Bachmann model of Bude signal box.  It was then that I spotted a review of the ABM Railcraft card kit in Railway Modeller so, keen to speed things along, I ordered the brick BR(S) version.

A clip from the ABM Railcraft website
Immediately I hit a problem.  The ABM kit has the station master's house on the left (viewed from the station yard side) and the booking office on the right, but I wanted them the other way round - as at Padstow, Delabole, Otterham, Tresmeer and Egloskerry.  I had almost decided to abandon the ABM kit and continue with my old model of Padstow when it occurred to me that I could scan the ABM cards into my computer, create mirror images, then print them out on good quality thin card.  Whilst doing this, I took the opportunity to give the brickwork a slightly pinker tint that more closely matched the Bachmann signal box, then, to give the model some much needed strength, I mounted the printed parts on 2mm card (1mm for the roof).

If you're tempted to do the same thing, it might be worth contacting ABM first.*  I see from their website that they are happy to reduce the kit to 3mm scale at no extra cost, so they may be equally happy to produce a mirror image version.

By now the urge to adapt had well and truly taken over.  Surely, I reasoned, an important holiday resort like St Petrock would have more station facilities than a country station such as Egloskerry - something more akin to Bude, perhaps.  So I duplicated part of the booking office and set it at 90 degrees to the main building, somewhat in the style of Bodmin General.

Peter Denny once advised me (there's name-dropping for you!) to scribe the horizontal lines of card roof tiles with a blunt screwdriver.  The result is a great improvement on flat card, though I'm less pleased with the ridge tiles, which I produced from plasticard.  One day, I tell myself, I'll replace them with tiles made from thin paper.

By the way, for this photo I simply plonked the building on St Petrock's unfinished platforms. There's lots of work to do here, including building a canopy to protect the passengers.  It has been known to rain in Cornwall, even in the summer!
 
Finally, I thought it only right that Station Master Hubert Penrose and his wife should be able to relax in front of a television when their day's work was done.  In 1960 the only channel available in these parts was BBC from the North Hessary Tor transmitter, so there's a Band 1 H-aerial on the roof.  How the memory fades... I'd quite forgotten that those old aerial rods were almost 10 feet long.  No wonder Cornish gales toppled them so often.

* ABM do indeed now offer a mirror image of their station bulding, and also a suitably modified version of the canopy.