East African Railway Station - Part 1

Well two posts in one day! Although in fairness the earlier post was written up yesterday.

With the lead pile exhausted and no figures due for a week or two, I have started on a project for some some East African buildings for use in an upcoming WWI in East Africa game later in the year.

First up is a railway station for East Africa. The inspiration for this came from the Major Thomas Foolery's War Room blog, who in turn got his inspiration from this image of the Moshi railway station.

From the start I decided to make the models from foam core board. There are two reasons for this. First is that I want to make them lightweight for ease of transport. Second is that I scored a significant amount of the stuff from work. We moved offices recently and when things were being cleared out the Safety and Wellbeing team...oh sorry they are called People Safety this month...were throwing out five 2.4 x 1.2 metre (that's 8ft x 4ft) sheets of foam core board which they could not use because they had the wrong branding. (It never fails to amaze me how people in marketing, HR or Health and Safety can go to this huge expense of producing this sort of signage and then discard it so easily because the Corporate branding people have now decided that  the Company logo cannot appear as white on a blue background...while in my little department I have to justify the purchase of half a dozen iPads that will recover their cost in three months and will continue to provide savings for years to come...). But I digress...and I now have 14.4 square metres (160 square feet) of foam core board, one side printed, one side white, in my garage.

My adaption of the railway station is going to have a goods or baggage area on the left, with the booking office, waiting room and other rooms on the right. Just like the Moshi station the goods/baggage area would have a tiled roof while the other part would have a corrugated iron roof. I wanted to use the tiled roof from an old plastic model railway kit that had been kicking around for years.

This placed some size limitations on me because the roof pieces were only 75mm wide and without having a ridiculously shallow roof profile could be set to a maximum depth of 80mm. But 80mm was too narrow for this structure and I decided that a corrugated iron roof would extend beyond the tiles. The whole section would have the external dimentions of 110 mm depth, 75mm width and 75mm height (to the roof apex).

The first task was to get the roof angle set, a task easily achieved with a bit of plastic card and glue.

This completed I marked out and cut the basic shapes four the goods/baggage area then cut out the doors and windows.

I then glued the four sides together, reinforcing the corners with right angled triangles cut from thick card.

Next to make was the ticket office/waiting room part of the building. This is a simple two level 110mm x 110 mm  structure with a height of 80mm.

It was quickly cut and the windows and doors cut out, but I left the cut outs for the windows in place, the reason for which will become clear later.

The two blocks were then glued together.

Finally the window frames and doors were constructed from plastic card, a task that probably looks much more tedious than it really was.

This is where work ended for the day, interrupted by guests for dinner.