Floors for the lookout tower

It's not too straight without the diagonal braces

That red assemblage of Peter-Austin girders, aka the fire lookout tower, has appeared in several posts about the Inglenook Lake layout. I've been thinking a lot about how to transform it from a skeletal form to a credible HO scale forest fire lookout tower, but over the last few days I got out my tools and materials and got down to some serious work.

The first step is floors, and how to link them with stairs.

A floor template was made and then traced multiple times onto a sheet of 0.030" thick sheet styrene.
Those holes are stairway openings.

I played around with various stairway organizations: wrapping them around the interior perimeter in a spiral from floor-to-floor; keeping all the stairs to one side; and finally, settling on a simple zig-zag up the centre of the structure. This last one allowed for the most room for the imaginary hauling of things up the stairs, and for stepping off one stairway to the next with enough clearance, all the while keeping each floor's perimeter free and clear for easy viewing into the forest.

For stairs I'm going to use Plastruct item number 90662. The packaging of these items is weird in that it states the stairs are HO-scale and 1:100. I ignored that. When placed near an HO-scale figure they look right, and inside the tower any issues with scale won't be noticeable. 

Test fitting the floors. They aren't glued in, just press fit.

Maybe I shouldn't, but I'm trying to make whatever parts I create for this thing be as stylistically close to original Peter-Austin parts as I can. Yes, I'll be painting the parts, but I want to see if I can create the illusion of a fictitious Peter-Austin play set being used to create a credible HO-scale structure. 

The roof is a laminate of styrene squares with a corrugated piece on top.
The notches on the inner ply are to set over pegs in the girders.

The structure still looks a bit clunky at this stage with its odd, toy-like colours and not so straight frame. All readily correctable as construction progresses. So far so good though. 

Wanderin'

I stumbled across this simple improvisational kitbash of Revell's Engine House on a vendor's table at last month's model railway swap meet. It's always good to see these old things out and about in the world. No, I didn't buy it as I've got a lot on my plate as it is, and that relic needs a lot of love to bring it back to life.

Ok, after Billy Preston really lightened my mood, I stumbled across VIA Rail getting into the music genre for study, sleep, meditation, focusing, and unwinding with this video entitled, Relaxing Train Sounds for Sleeping:

In case you were wondering, there's a French version too (or maybe I should reverse things and say there's an English version too :-) ) ! 

As the calming train sounds got me all relaxed and horizontal I started again to think about the pleasant horizontality of the Expeditor floatplane:

The Expeditor and the Lockheed Model 12 Electra Junior both are cool expressions of mid to late 1930s aerodynamic streamlining that I quite like.

The floatplane version of the Bronco doesn't have that highly planar sleekness, but it does have a purposeful look to it. 

Well, the time change is getting the better of me, so I'll leave you with some classic Billy Preston, and a dash of Anthony Bourdain: