This is a simple walk-through of my construction of Cleveland Freight Transfer, a busy spot on my pike where a lot of freight transfers to and from railcars.
First, this is my second major building using Walther's Modulars, so I did have some experience using them. One thing I will mention is that they are considerably thinner than similar DPM parts, making them a bit flimsy. As a result, you need to use strong glue to make sure the whole thing doesn't fall apart when you go to move it. Normally, I use Testors glue that comes in the black plastic bottle when I'm building models. But it's not strong enough, so when working with modulars, I use the "old school" Testors glue that comes in the orange tube. It's considerably stronger than the black tube stuff, if a lot messier. But once it's dry, it's hard as a rock.
When doing a large building, I also suggest using the printouts available from the Walthers site to mock up your building first. This will let you know just how many packs you need of each Modular. The other thing I don't like about Modulars is you have to buy separate packs that have all the pilasters and foundation pieces you need. Thankfully, you can usually get all the sets on sale for fairly cheap. You can't afford to build any sizable building paying full price.
After doing my mock-up and testing it on the layout for size, I began construction. First I painted all the pieces and added my brick treatment on everything except for the pilasters (I did them later in the process for some reason). My brick treatment is simple -- I spray paint all the pieces dark red. Then I paint all the pieces with white Tempera paint and let it dry. Next, I take a damp paper towel and wipe off most of the paint. This gave me a great look -- if it were a house in the suburbs. It was much too clean looking. So I took some brown tempera paint and repeated the process, which worked out really well.
Here are some shots of construction in progress:
These towers were a pain to assemble and honestly, the Modulars aren't really engineered very well to handle this type of configuration. You have to do some fudging and cutting to get them to work right.
If you'll notice, I left most of the freight doors open. This meant I would need a lot of interior space. I used some leftover foundation pieces and a large piece of styrene to serve as the interior dock. The use of the foundation pieces put the styrene dock at exactly the right level.
Here's the interior portion in place. I used a couple of leftover modular pieces to serve as interior "office" walls. I also found some images of stacked boxes on the Internet and folded them up to be 3D. They actually look pretty good, especially when there isn't a camera flash lighting up the interior!
The roofs between the towers were pretty fiddly to get to fit right. There are still some small gaps, but they are small enough that they aren't really noticeable.
I got a box of details together that I wanted to use and painted them up.
The finished building in place. To the left, you can just barely see a pair of truck bays. There will also be a road and large parking lot for truck trailers around back. (These last few shots were also taken with my new camera, which will hopefully upgrade the quality.) Overall, I'm really happy with how the weathering turned out on this and the details make it look really busy. Now I just need to scenic around it. Most of the area around the spurs will be outside storage for larger freight like steel coils and big pieces of machinery. Originally, I was going to have an overhead crane, but I just couldn't get it to fit right. So I'll have a small jib crane on a platform and a vehicle-based crane to unload those flat cars and gondolas.
A view from under the viaduct.
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