The boathouse depot that appears on my entry for LR Presse's Le Grand DÉFI is a completely fictional RDC stop on the route of Train 185. It was a lot of fun to design and build, and it didn't take long to go from rough sketches to finished model.
I always start scratchbuilding projects with a drawing, well, almost always. In this case it was particularly important because space was tight, and I wanted to make the building as credible looking as I could. This meant I needed to work out a lot of details so that I felt confident with this project before construction started.
My drawings for these sorts of projects aren't beautiful things. Their purpose is to help me work out sizes and shapes. Given the unique space constraints with this project I didn't feel a drawing alone would be sufficient as a planning guide, so I also made a simple cardboard mockup. I rarely do this, but again, space was very tight.
The mockup was taped together from pieces cut from cheap Bristol Board and foam board. Beauty isn't important here, just the sizes and shapes of the components.
I made the drawing while the base was under construction so that I worked back and forth between the two in order to come up with dimensions that would fit. The mockup was built after the diorama base was finished so I had something to try the mockup on. You can see in the above photo the building and platform needs to be raised up some more so the platform is level with the bottom of the RDC's cargo door.
As you can see in the above photo, a depth of 15cm isn't much to work with as the RDC is quite big (It turns out it's about 2mm shorter than the length of the diorama, so it just fits!). And yes, in the end there is about a 1' scale gap between the RDC and the platform. They don't touch as shown in the above photo.
The platform is 8' wide, which is rather narrow for such a thing, but pretty much as wide as I dared to make it on this diorama. I wanted space for the lakeshore up front to accommodate the kayaker and some at the back to separate the backdrop from the main action on the base. In reality the platform should probably be around 16' wide at minimum, and there should be some sort of ramps and stairs down to the shore. In my design the canoes and kayaks would have to be carefully lifted on and off the platform, all the while making sure no one fell off since there are no railings! Is this realistic? Well, I'm a geriatric with a bum shoulder and I can still lift my canoe up and over my head, so I'm going to declare the diorama's scenario plausible :-)
The back side is just a flat wall that looks as if I simply sliced the boathouse from a fully formed building. I couldn't have much three-dimensionality on this side because there needed to be room for the RDC to roll by. You can see on the mockup that I penciled in a window on the back wall. On the model I included two.
This end view gives an idea about how close the clearances are, but it's workable.
Once I had settled on the dimensions it was on to cutting out the walls. They're made from some of Evergreen's clapboard siding sheet styrene. The windows are Tichy Train Group items (the windows on the back wall are N-scale parts). The doors, whose openings are shown in the above photo, were all scratchbuilt from styrene odds-and-ends.
As I noted previously the back wall was fitted with two window units to provide the boaters with a good view back into the bush, and of a parked RDC if need be. The side walls each have a floor-to-ceiling window at the front so one can look up-and-down the shoreline if the weather is too bad to go outside.
The outside wall surfaces and window frames were painted with a loose mixture of Tamiya XF-7 Flat Red and Revel Aqua Color 36137 Reddish Brown, which is the same mix I used on the Insectary and its cousin. I wanted a freshly painted look so the building would make a strong contrast with respect to the greens in the landscape and background, so I didn't soften or weather it. I don't recall the green I used on the passage door, but let's call it a flavour of Moore Green :-)
The inside wall surfaces were panelled with 0.020" x 0.040" strip styrene to simulate wall studs and blocking. It isn't very prototypical; it's just enough to give a hint of wall detail if one glances inside. The walls were painted Tamiya XF-57 Buff with a dirty brush.
The boathouse's floor, deck, and loading platform are all one piece built up from pre-scored Evergreen sheet styrene for the deck and platform, and plain styrene sheet I scored myself for the boathouse floor.
The underside is panelled with some rudimentary joist work made from strip styrene. Again, it's just supposed to suggest joists to stray glances. Even so, it does considerably stiffen the structure.
The upper platform and deck surfaces were painted to match the building. Since these are horizontal surfaces I loosely brushed on some thin washes of greys, light browns, and beiges to represent sand and dirt. Not much, just a little. The boathouse floor was painted to match the interior walls, but several spills and deeper grimy stains were applied.
The various wooden railings were made from styrene strip. All were built the same way: a railing plan was drawn on some paper, and pieces of strip styrene were laid on top and glued together.
And there it is with all the railings installed. I should mention the staircases are items from my scrap box as is the yellow hand rail.
The other thing I should mention, since it's front-and-centre in the above photo, is the big opening between the railings opposite the loading door on the front wall. Why's it there you might ask? I had a plan that a pier might extend into the lake from this point for fishermen, divers, or sightseers, and might also provide a spot for large cruisers or pontoon boats to dock. Well, there was no room for even a hint of that extension on this diorama, and I don't foresee me placing this building on another layout that might accommodate one, so I just eventually strung a vestigial safety wire (which should be replaced with a properly hanging safety chain) across the opening and left it as an enigma.
The boathouse structure was the easy part of this model: it's basically just a decorated box. The tricky part was the roof. I wanted to try my hand at making a hip roof as I thought it would make the building look more interesting, and its overhang would provide good shade over the boathouse's deck. I also wanted the roof to be removable so I could change scenes inside, and have a light in the attic that could be switched on-and-off. For the light I used a small, LED button light. All this added up to a trickier than usual project within a project.
In the above photo the roof's structure has been built up from 0.040" thick sheet styrene. The recess in the attic has been sized to accommodate the button LED. The button has some bulk, so the recess hides it from casual viewing.
In the above view you can get a better idea of the size of the recess. You can also see the channel that has been built up along the recess's perimeter. That's so the roof can sit snug on the top of the walls and won't slide off if bumped. It turns out I had to make the channel deeper with sidewalls about twice as tall compared to those in the photo in order to get a clean, seamless fit with the boathouse's walls. And it's a tight fit too. It takes a little wiggling to remove.
Speaking of fit, I kept checking it as I built up the structure.
The rafters were panelled with 0.020" sheet styrene. That's a bit thin, but when I was calculating the sizes for this structure's components I didn't account for the thickness of the roof panels, so I went with some sheeting that was thin, but had a little structural stiffness. These panels may sag in the years ahead, but real roofs sag too for similar reasons.
Those lines on the roof side panels are guidelines for shingles.
The shingles are just strips cut from fine sandpaper to which I've attached some 3M Transfer Tape on the back. I didn't try and simulate individual shingles. I thought strips would be alright to give a suggestion of asphalt shingles.
To apply I just peeled the paper backing off the Transfer Tape and stuck down the shingle strip. When in place I trimmed the strip to conform to the roof's shape.
Disclosure! After painting the shingles many of them started to curl and peel off. I then had to laboriously go and stick them back down with dabs of white glue. It seemed to take a long time and was quite frustrating to get a quasi-neat job, which still isn't quite right. In the future I'll go back to my usual practice of using a white glue like Weld Bond to stick these down. It makes shingling take longer, but at least I don't have to redo my work.
Some thin paper strips were used for metal flashing. The peak eventually had a piece of fine mesh inserted inside to let air in and keep birds out. However, I think the mesh isn't fine enough to keep out scale mosquitos :-)
Here's that LED button light. Its casing is actually black, but I painted it to match the interior. You can also see in this photo how much the wall channel has been extended compared to the original construction.
The LED throws off a pretty good light!
Here's the roof, more-or-less finished at this point. The mesh has been installed in the peak and painted to match the building.
A rare view of the back wall. Well, rare because once the building was installed on the diorama you have to peek carefully into the space between the building and the background to see it.
From this angle it really does look like the building has had its back end chopped off. The roof probably needs some guttering to channel rain water away from the deck. A detail for next time.
That brings us to the end of this little story. Well, it brings us to the end of what I have photos for. I haven't discussed a few things, like building the concrete piers the boathouse and platform sit on. They're just stacks of styrene blocks I cut from a styrene stick. Those stacks would probably get a foundation guy fired given how misaligned and rickety they appear, but I say they give the scene some character :-) Loading door construction I've discussed in other posts and don't want to repeat here. They're just built up from pieces of scrap styrene.
That's it for now. I'm off to look for my canoe :-)
