VIA Drummondville Station - Part 1

I'm glad to announce work will soon resume on our club layout due to COVID-19 restrictions being progressively lifted in Quebec. I must admit it is about time because while I liked working on various projects at home, I lacked focus, started a lot of stuff that made little sense and left these project half made. However, a lot was learned so nothing was wasted. Meanwhile, I'm completing a special project.

As you may know, a few months ago, Groupe TRAQ in Charny commissionned me to create a replica of VIA Drummondville station for their small switching layout. This station is a well-known stop for all trains moving east from Montreal. For this reason, it's a well-documented building that most railfans in the area and also outside Quebec can recognize instantly. It is also one of the rare old depot still surviving and in service, which had even more interest. It will also work as the anchor scene when operating the layout, so no reason to skip on accuracy.

For this reason, I felt kitbashing some generic Walthers brick station wouldn't be enough to capture the prototype. It would be simpler to start from scratch and build from the ground. Being myself, meaning I can be quite lazy, I sent a friend to take a lot of pictures of the building. I didn't ask for specific dimensions because I knew I could figure them out by guesstimating the dimensions using bricks and Google Earth. Being an architect working on heritage buildings means I've developed a kind of expertise when it's time to find out dimensions on old buildings.

One thing that surprised me was how long this structure is in real life. It is about 114 feet long x 24 feet. If you include the eaves, the station is about 18 inches long! Not an easy model to work with.

To build the model, I used Walthers brick plastic sheets. They look very good and have an English bond pattern which make them suitable for old buildings. However, they are not great to cut. If you score the plastic and snap the parts, you don't get a neat break. So it's better to cut through and finsih the job with a file.

Unfortunately, I made a mistake when converting the brick courses from the prototype into scale measurement. I ended up with vertical dimensions being shrunk drastically. Unfortunately, I only found it when designing the 3D doors and windows. Their proportions didn't look good at all. It seems I grossly underestimated their height! I had two choices: throw the walls away and about 4 days of work or try to fix my mistake. I opted for the second option. It meant I sliced every walls to insert additional brick courses. There new parts where sliced which took a lot of time. But worst, I needed every mortar joint to align perfectly. Unfortunately, Walthers sheets don't have a consistent thickness. It varies a lot, so I had to eyeball the brick surface alignement under my desk lamp, using shadows to figure out if parts were well aligned.

Then I sanded down the surface to make sure everything was flushed. Under normal circumstances, I would have made new walls. It would have been as fast, but I didn't want to waste material. Also, Drummondville station brick walls aren't in great shape on the prototype. Many years of repairs have left the brick works full of patches. To hide these defects, the walls are painted in red since several decades. So, it means I can paint my walls like the prototype and get away, to a certain extent, with the defects. To be honest, only a coat of primer with convince me if this was a good decision. I certainly hope so!