The Railwire January 2018 Modeling Challenge:
Main Structure
I started with the end walls for the main structure: two kit walls were required for each in order to simplify the roofline—the saw removes too much material to simply cut one part and reassemble it.
The side walls were considerably easier. Since one of them will be almost entirely covered by extensions and additions, it won't need any modification; the other was made up of parts from two side walls in order to do away with the section that has the door, toward the upper left.
Meanwhile, because the roof of the original kit fits behind the end walls, as opposed to over them, I trimmed the tops of the end wall assemblies back to match the side wall height. Note that I'm ignoring the fact that the roof pitch of the model is significantly different from that of the real building. I added .080" Evergreen I-beam parts to the freight doors on street side end wall.
The back end of the main structure has a small single-story extension. After I bashed these walls together, I rebuilt the end wall of the main building when I noticed that the real one has a small decorative window near the peak. I used the original Vulcan center wall part to add this touch, and repeated it on the extension end wall as well, even though in real life this wall is quite different. (The misalignment of the center windows doesn't matter, since they'll all be covered up.)
The extension side wall that faces the street (lower right, above) was cobbled together from various scraps; it's not faithful to the real one, but it captures the feeling. The side wall opposite this is covered by yet another extension out back, so it can be plain styrene. Meanwhile, I discovered that Grandt Line 20/20 enginehouse windows, when cut in half, were a decent fit for the large end wall window openings—a small styrene shim on each side was all that's needed to make it work.
With all of the main building walls cut and pasted, I proceeded to fill in the window openings as needed, so I could install the new windows and begin the main assembly.
