Scratchbuilding a Potato House - Part 5

On Monday afternoon, I finished the potato house. There wasn't much work left to do on it after what I described in part 4 of this series, and it only took about two hours of work to finish off the potato house. I would have finished it Sunday evening, in fact, but the Patriots were playing in the Super Bowl, so that was more of a priority than model railroading for me. At any rate, all that was left to do was to paint the roof and weather the structure, and neither of those things took very long. The roof was simply painted with black acrylic paint, which covered fairly well, or at least well enough so that I did not have to add a second coat of paint. I then weathered the entire structure. I did not do anything elaborate on this building, as it should look like it was well maintained and the site of a fairly prosperous business, rather than a pile of rotting wood on the verge of collapse. Too often, I think you see structures that modelers have weathered to such an extent that it is no longer realistic, and seems like a caricature of a building. As far as I can tell from prototype photos, most building during the 50s seem to be well maintained on the whole, if not pristine. Of course, not having been alive during the 50s (or any time during the 20th century), I can't say for sure, but it still seems that many weather structures (and freight cars, and so on) to a point where they are not realistic.

To get back to the potato house, however, I gave the roof and the concrete supports for the building a drybrushing of light gray acrylic. This gives the tar paper on the roof a nice, faded, look, in my opinion. I also gave the walls and roof a light drybrushing of brown paint, to simulate both dirt and wood showing through the paint. Other than that, the potato house was left in good condition.

This is the track side of the potato house. I put the refrigerator car next to the potato house to give some idea of the size of the building. The potato house has a capacity of two cars, and during the late October to early January potato rush both spots would be in almost continuous use. One of the nice things about a layout where almost all industries are potato houses is that you get a lot of operational value for your space if you model potato season. At that time of year, it would be prototypically correct to have such a small industry be switched multiple times a week as so many potatoes had to be loaded.

Another view of the track side of the potato house.

The truck unloading area of the potato house. When this structure is attached to a layout, an entrance to the door ill be made by placing a chunk of styrene strip below the door to represent a concrete block, and then a pile of dirt or gravel will be built up around this concrete block.

One end of the potato house.

I took this photo to roughly replicate the prototype photo that originally inspired me to build this potato house. You can see the prototype photo here.

I'm personally rather pleased with how this project turned out. While there is always room for improvement, I think that this structure turned out quite well. Mostly, the roofing could have been better, though I think this is in large part because the masking tape I was using is getting old and so isn't as easy to work wit as it once was.

As for the next project, my main goal is to work on layout design for a layout based on the Bangor and Aroostook in Houlton. This layout will have to be portable in some way, as it will have to move up and down two flights of stairs, and will also have to live in a bedroom, so it has to be somewhat presentable. I'll most likely post about this soon, or at least as soon as I have some decent ideas about what I want to do with this worked out.