Toys and Stuff: TRAIN TIME: Part 19 A New Passenger Shelter For The Edge of Town Layout

Saturday, December 26, 2020

TRAIN TIME: Part 19 A New Passenger Shelter For The Edge of Town Layout

Did everyone have a Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Frohe Weinachten, Mele Kalikimaka, Kelemesz Unnepeket? - okay I'm running out of ways to say it here LOL Ours was good. The grandbaby made out like a bandit - Opa Fritz got chocolate hahahahahaha

As one would imagine, work on my Edge of Town (EoT) micro-layout had pretty much come to a halt. What with the Halloween layout, then the Gettysburg set-up, followed by the Christmas layout, the EoT has taken a back seat and I even stated in one of my Christmas layout Y'allTube uploads that nothing would happen until next year. I lied. :-) Anywho, this past week found me with a couple of days in a row with some actual, real life, honest-to-goodness 'me' time! Wow! how did that happen?

I was sitting at the layout running a recent acquisition, a Williams NW-2 lettered for the Wisconsin Central.

Then I got to thinking about the latest project I had been working on (and slow leaking): a 'new' passenger platform for the layout. Until now I have been using a Plasticville Freight Depot (an odd choice of names by Plasticville because the thing looks more like a suburban passenger shelter).

But as small as this is I've been wanting something even smaller, something that hearkens back to my days when I was really into narrow gauge/shortline/branchline type of railroading. So I bought a junker freight depot off of fleaBay and modified it by cutting it down, cutting off legs and re-positioning them. This was where I stopped about 6 weeks ago:

Fast forward to this week and my 'me' time, and I was thinking there was enough time to do some more work on this by adding a new deck (to hide the post holes in the original deck), framing it with 'boards', and distressing the plastic to look like really old beat-up wood. I then pulled out a Plasticville 2-stall outhouse and cut out the middle wall/partion and sanded the back wall. It was glued to the deck and everything given a coat of tan primer.

Funny thing, but when I had the idea for this I was trolling the Internet and found a picture of a real one that looked almost exactly like this (I forgot to save the pic tho) but here are some other inspirations culled from the Net. In rural communities these small platforms could either be flagstop stations, milk platforms, or a combination of the two. I'll be using it in a combination mode.

below photos credited to the Internet!