Model Railroad Buildings

The Walthers' Modern Coaling Tower

Most of the major buildings for the Birchardville Railroad are built up from Walthers Cornerstone plastic model kits. These kits are mainly manufactured by Heljan for Walthers, to Walthers' specifications. I've found that the molding of plastic parts is very well done, with little or no flashing and with (usually) tiny sprue connections that are easily trimmed with a hobby knife. Some of the parts, particularly for the Modern Concrete Coaling Tower, are tiny (less than 1/4 inch or 3 millimeters in their largest dimension!), and seem to disappear readily. Still, I only lost a couple and was able to make similar looking parts from sections of sprue for a couple lost pully parts.

The pictures to the left were taken near the end of the construction, principally to show the assembly of the various stair and railing components and their placement on the structure. I thought these would be quite fragile, but my ham handed (amateur radio is another avocation around here) handling shows they aren't nearly as breakable as I thought.

The last three pictures are of the structure as completed (before any painting or weathering was done), and before placement on the layout. I felt I needed to have three buildings (roundhouse, coaling tower, and union station) finished before I could lay track, since they had critical track positions involved.

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