This title can be misleading if you believe I found architectural drawings of Armagh station. On the contrary, I have nothing on my hand except a few very blurry old pictures from the 1950s and a 3/4 view of the east gable when the station was in derelict state in the 1970s. From these pictures, we can surmise the station was very long, with an extended freight house section and most likely based on standard Grand Trunk Pacific designs, which was common on National Transcontinental Railway. That's where the detective work starts to find a few key information such as general dimensions, internal layout, roof geometry and many more. So here we go!
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| This is probably the best picture of Armagh Station (source: Facebook) |
One of the first thing that we know is that GTP had several standard designs classified by letters: Type A, type B, type C, etc. With that knowledge, I wanted to see how far I could go online, within a day, to find everything I needed to replicate a decent version of Armagh Station.
The first step was to Google simple terms such as "Grand Trunk Pacific" "Station Drawings" "Type E". Luckily enough, there was a short PDF file produced by the Province of Manitoba which collated informations taken from Charles Bohi’s book "Canadian National’s Western Depots". In the PDF, there was a set of station plans identified as GTP Type D and Type E, with Type E looking identical to Armagh if not for the shorter freight house. Upon further investigation, it appeared the authors had inverted the caption and it should have been Type D.
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| Drawings recovered from a PDF (credit: Province of Manitoba) |
I tried to find it Library and Archives Canada had some drawings online, but I didn't find a lot to help me. So I imported that drawing into SketchUp, a 3D modelling sotfware, and scaled it to HO. I didn't take long to have an entire set of drawings, however, no a single one was fitting with the other one, particularly in the roof. I was puzzled until I manage to discover that these drawings had been pieced together and badly stretched, making them only reliable in the X axis. Unfortunately, the drawings were so blurry it was impossible to read what was written, including the dimensions. I could fiddle a bit, but I needed more help.
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| Scaling the drawings became quite tricky |
That help came from Charles Bohi's book which I searched for a copy online with the intention of probably buying it. It wasn't hard to find and some only shop displayed a few pages to show the content. Once again, luck was on my side because of there very few pages, two were about station Type D, listing interior and exterior dimensions that I could use to scale the drawings from the PDF. Better, Bohi was giving an excellent description of the hipped roof shaped, in particular the presence of a flat spot on top of the station main building. That was the key to understand why I couldn't make sense of the roof. It was just a matter of time before I had a set of perfectly scaled drawings that could be used to built a station.
However, the extended freight house layout didn't seem to be a standard practice on GTP and since I only had very poor pictures of Armagh, I was hard to guess the overall dimensions and location of doors and windows. It then struck me that since Armagh was a sizable town on the line and the midpoint between two division points, it was probably why the station was so large. You only require such a warehouse if you have a lot of goods for larger customers. It was a common pattern on the old Monk Subdivision: many station had GTP layouts but with extended freight house. If such a thing was common on Monk, it would also be shared by stations on other NTR subdivision. At that point, I asked myself which towns in the Abitibi area could have such a larger stations. I selected Amos because it wasn't a division point, but still a very large settlement.
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| Amos station in 1945 (source: BAnQ) |
I tried finding information on Quebec National Archives (BAnQ) and found many pictures of the town in the 1910s up to the 1940s. Not only the station was almost identical to Armagh, but I even had aerial pictures of it. In general, Amos station photographs were of much higher quality, with helped to figure out key details and dimensions. The only noticeable difference was the location of the second freight house door.
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| Extract of Amos insurance plan by Underwriter's Laboratories (source: BAnQ) |
But while these pictures were of a great help, I still needed to figure out exact dimensions of the extended freight house. At that moment, it crossed my mind that such a large town as Amos was bound to have been surveyed by insurance company mappers. A quick BAnQ search shown it was the case and that the station had been documented. This was the final piece of the puzzle and what I discovered was a very large station that really as a lot of presence.
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| Locating the freight house openings in Illustrator |
The last big challenge was locating with some precision the openings that existed in the freight house. Most pictures of Amos and Armagh stations are shot in such angles that you can't see everything. However, we can assume there was, from left to right, two large sliding doors, two windows, a door and, most likely, another window right by the telegraphist bay.
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| Crude 3D rendering of the station |
At that point, I was content with my work and the 3D model fitted almost perfectly the photographs of Armagh Station... until Chris Mears pointed out that CP Tracks website had PFD files of old GTP drawings! They had the 100-154 drawings available in much better quality, even though it was based on a photocopy and some deformations were clearly visible. The interesting part is these plans were different from the one shown in Bohi's book. They are quite similar, sharing the exact same dimensions and window placement, but I could see that interior partition walls in the office was different and there was much more details on chimneys. Also, there was a basement right under the office, something I wasn't aware.
Using that new data, I compared my first draft and started to correct it. The section drawing were of higher resolution, so I was able to figure out the way they built the curved roof eaves. That was the linch pin to finally get the dormers right.
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| Improved drawings |
All in all, it was a fascinating and quick project while I can barely do nothing on the layout. I had some issue with the sanitary drain and a contractor will replace it by Christmas. It means a new trench must be dug in the concrete floor of my hobby room to install the new pipe. I will give me an opportunity to improve the benchwork and backdrop later on.
Meanwhile, I will check if it's worth 3D printing or scratchbuilding the station. Maybe it will be a mix of both mediums. I feel like 3D printing is cheating though!
