Booths Siding in 009: a shed evolves...

A few months ago I began sketching ideas for buildings for my new layout 'Booths Siding' which will be a second 'Creech Bottom' layout featuring a Purbeck clay tramway...

I'm one for quite small locomotives so nothing commercially available would cut it - for a while I'd toyed with using a 'Porthgain' type of shed, but I'd like to save that for the Porthgain model I want to build one day, so instead I'd grabbed inspiration from one of the sheds, infact the workshop I believe, at Eaton Hall. This obviously is a 'minimum gauge' prototype, so I've not used dimensions from this, rather I've scaled it to look right with my Manning Wardle 'Quintus'.

Construction is simply Slaters brick (English bond) plasticard, with L-section Plastruct section in the corners for strength. The roof of the shed is 30 thou plasticard, the office again Slaters, 4mm corrugated iron. The lintels and window sills are Plastic 'micro-strip section.

Progress was quite quick - just a few hours in total. I made a start on the roof, for this I used some card (actually 'As seen in Railway Modeller' cards I received when Creech Bottom featured in the magazine a few years ago). These were marked up and then cut with scissors and fixed in place with PVA. The capping is just a piece of folded card. I modelled one or two damaged slates and one that had dropped down which gives the same sort of impression as photos in the book on the Pike Brothers tramway.

The last stage was the ventilator, which is 30 thou plasticard at each end, the ventilator section is Slaters 4mm corrugated plastic used backwards, and the roof is corrugated plastic with a card capping.

The office has a piece of corrugated iron on as a patch repair, and the stove chimney replaces the brick chimney shown in my original concept sketch. The doors are Slaters wood planking with Micro-strip bracing and hinges. The windows will be scratchbuild in styrene after the model is painted.

This shows the windows in the back of the shed, facing the operator. The last step on the roof will be to add some lead flashing to the ventilator and around the stove pipe - and then add some guttering. It's nice to make a start on structures for the layout, which might get a slight re-think so I can enter it in the Model Railway Journal 'Cameo Layout' competition. More, inevitably, soon...