The observation shelter at Inspiration Point

The finished shelter awaits placement on the layout.

On the Mt. Lowe railway there was a large, open air shelter at Inspiration Point. It allowed visitors to get out of the weather while they had a look at the spectacular views of the San Gabriel Valley, Los Angeles, and Santa Catalina Island in the Pacific Ocean. 

For reference I loosely based my shelter on the photo of the real thing found on page 192 of Mount Lowe: The Railway in the Clouds by Charles Seims.

Suitably inspired I set about designing a much smaller version for my little layout.

Preliminary sketches and working drawing for a small, S-scale observation shelter

The structure is built more-or-less entirely from styrene except for the corrugated aluminium roofing and 3x5 card roof flashing.

Speaking of the roof, that's where I started.

Roof panels in jig.

I made up a foam board jig for holding the roof pieces in alignment while the glue set up. Each roof piece is cut from 0.020" thick sheet styrene according to the dimensions in the working drawing.

It seems like a complicated structure, what with those intersecting angles in the centre, but appearances are deceiving. The trick is to first layout the 'straight' edges of each piece using the dimensions from the front and side elevations on the working drawings, then connect the remaining 'opening' with a line that will then become the edge of the angled side. No measuring of angles is required. 

The roof holds its shape once the glue is dry.

Once the glue has hardened the structure holds its shape without any additional supports. I did add rafters and trusses to make the roof look right, and they did firm up the structure even more, but the structure can be handled without them. Any inaccuracies in gluing can be sanded out at this stage to yield a rather uniform structure.

First round of roof trusses installed.

The roof trusses were built up in the same manner as those made for the Poppyfield Flats station to give the two structures something of a family look.

At this stage I wasn't sure how many trusses to add, and only glued in the minimum number. I was trying to decide if I should make the inside roof truss detail representative of a real roof, or just add enough to suggest everything was there. I eventually went with the latter. I think if this was an O-scale or larger structure, it would be necessary to add in all the detail for the sake of appearances, but S is still relatively small to just suggest it.

All trusses added. The ones second from ends have their bottom stringers thickened.

So, here's the roof with a few more trusses and beams added so that casual glances inside suggest structure. 

You may notice the trusses that are second from the ends have had their bottom stringers thickened. I discovered an alignment problem when I placed the roof on the support posts, and the easiest way to correct it was to add more stringers to the inside bottom of both trusses. Ideally I should have repositioned the trusses, but by the time a test uncovered the problem, it wasn't going to be easy to tear them out, so I cheated :-)

Roof is panelled with corrugated aluminum.

The roof is panelled with pieces of Campbell corrugated aluminum glued on with Weld Bond. Flashing is cut from a piece of 3x5 card and held on with 3M transfer tape.

Building up the front and back walls.

The walls are simpler to make than the roof. The posts are cut from 0.125" x 0.125" square styrene strips and sandwiched between two pieces of 0.040" thick sheet styrene that make up the inner layer of the half-wall. 

At first I thought the back wall would have openings so visitors could wander onto the rock behind the shelter. Well, test placements showed the shelter took up nearly all the area on Inspiration Point. Allowing visitors to wander out back was just an invitation to falling off the cliff! So, I changed the design and made the back wall just as solid and contiguous as the front. 

Gluing up the walls. Now it's beginning to look like something!

The stone surfacing is just pieces of stone-textured styrene sheet glued onto the styrene sub-structure.

Concrete capping for the stone wall is pieced together from styrene scraps.

The concrete capping is made from pieces of 0.040" thick styrene scraps. Once trimmed to size, any gaps were filled in with putty and sanded to give a uniform surface.

And that's basically it for construction. Before gluing the roof to the posts, both assemblies were painted. The white is Vallejo's cool white acrylic. The capping is a mixture of some old Model Master aged concrete and camouflage grey. The rock walls were painted with acrylics used to paint the mountains. Rock weathering and mortaring was added with Tamiya brown panel liner.

I'll likely need to do some colour corrections on the stonework once the shelter has been installed on the layout, but it'll be interesting blending it in.

Well, that's 2 of the layout's 3 structures done. The one remaining is the circular bridge. Before I step up to that challenge, I'll need to mellow out. While working on the shelter this version of the Foster Sylvers' classic Misdemenor by Admad Jamal came up on an 'Round Midnight show I was listening to and it did the trick and will no doubt do it again in the future.