Kettle Falls Engine Shop

Here's a project I've been working on for quite a while now, and I thought it's now worthy for posting. This engine shop is completely freelanced because the town of Kettle Falls never had its own engine shop until the BNSF merger. The structure was built using a Downtown Deco hydrocal engine shed kit that I received from a great friend, Russ Segner in Washington state, for my birthday. These Downtown Deco kits are great fun to build and are extremely realistic because of the hand-etched brickwork on the hydrocal castings. They're very labor intentsive but in the end it is well worth the work. And thankfully, after looking at lots of photos of GN brick engine shops I noticed that they all matched the same architecture as the kit. So, I didn't have to do much work to make the engine shed look right at home in a town that never contained a shop until after my prototype modeling time period.

I kitbashed this structure to fit the space I had for the engine shop, and discovered once again when you start doing your own thing it's hard not to make mistakes, which happened a few times. So, the moral of the story is follow instructions. It's important! Now, let's move onto the photos!


When kitbashing I decided to lengthen the side wall using pieces from the wall that I eliminated since it butts up against the backdrop. I used an fingernail emery board to clean up the castings and enlarged the window openings, which took a lot of work. When assembling the building, I used popsicle sticks to re-enforce the main wall.
















After that was dry, I painted the brickwork. I painted the whole thing with a good "Brick Red" color. After that dried completely I made a grey wash with a medium grey, cheap acrylic paint, 75% rubbing alcohol to break up the surface tension, and 25% water. I brushed the wash over the red paint working in sections so I could have time to wipe off all the grey from the top of the "bricks" using a paper towel. This creates a very realistic mortar look. After that was completed I brushed individual bricks here and there on the wall a different shade of brown or red to give it some variety from the uniform "brick color". After this I did a little weathering to it with weathering powders to make it look like rain washed dirt and tar from the roof down the sides over time.
                                                                                              

 

After all this painting, I installed the windows which I painted a red lead oxide paint color, which was commonly found on older GN structures (this is unfortunate because the red lead oxide paint was toxic and messed up tons of GN worker's lungs).
After window installation I assembled all the walls together, which was pretty simple. The front wall with shop doors on the kit was completely a wood assembly, which wasn't too hard to make if you follow the instructions. With the shop walls assembled I constructed the roof. The roof was completely styrene that I covered with black paper to represent tar paper. After that, I made the "concrete" base for the structure on the layout with plaster which included embedding the track to represent a concrete floor, and that's about it! I just have to install large skylights to the roof and attach the roof completely to the building and I'll be done. So, here's the model on layout. The roof looks bad because I haven't attached it yet to the structure and also there is a white bald spot where a skylight goes. All in all, Downtown Deco makes some great kits that are very fun to build.