Quanah, Acme and Pacific (QA&P) - West Texas - Fictitious Model Railroad Layout Agriculture Industry

Discussion in 'Freelance' started by skyraider, Oct 13, 2019.

  1. patrick flory

    patrick flory Member

    That’s the one I’m talking about. I redid one of those for a club I used to be in. They gave me a half dozen or so wrecks to try to save and I took the challenge.

    I took off the clock tower and covered the roof with corrugated tin. And I trimmed out a bunch of the window muntins and filed the remaining ones thinner. The last thing which doesn’t show up well was replacement of the oversized awning support rods with fine .013 wire that was actually an old guitar string. Painted it grey and that was that.

    I was an architect before I retired . An overused phrase in the field that I got really tired of hearing was a building having “good bones.” This kit actually does, as a bunch of those European kits do.

    I wish I’d kept that building . And about 4 or 5 other dogs I saved similarly. I had a disagreement with the club and in short order they sold off all my rescues at some show. Didn’t bother to ask if I wanted them back, which I would have.

    One question. On your layout just to the right of the Pola warehouse is another warehouse like structure. What is it?

    8D7A2918-A1BA-4CE3-8509-D44B2A6385B5.jpeg 01DAD00F-9D2A-4645-820D-5FD6C27CCE5B.jpeg
     
  2. skyraider

    skyraider Member

    Man, you're right--that is the same building! Too funny!! On many kits--rolling stock and structures--I do the same thing you mentioned by filing parts down. Filing down heavy stirrups on freight cars, the edges of roof walks to make them look thinner, etc. Your building looks great. You definitely should have kept it!!!! The overall gray looks nice.

    I took three years of architecture in high school but color vision (seriously defective color vision) prevented me from pursuing that career path. My wife gets bombarded with color questions any time I'm modeling. My best friend growing up was in the same architecture classes. We roomed together for three years in college and he majored in architecture. When I was in youth ministry in Indianapolis (we called it Indian no place) my room mate there was an architect.

    If this is the structure in question, it is the Campbell Supply Company--a good old Campbell kit. There's one on ebay right now for ONLY $77... The photo below was taken on the dual gauge layout we had when we lived in Colorado Springs. That layout is a peninsula off of the new West Texas layout I'm currently building.

    Thanks for the great comments and for informing me of the origins of one of my models!! You've got me motivated to start checking on ebay for some of these brick european structures to use for kit bashing.

    Serious thread drift, but have you tried any of these new paper structures? My brother has a real nice color printer, and today we printed a couple of free ones to try them out.

    Paul Moore
    IMG_4351 copy.jpg
     
  3. gna

    gna Member Frisco.org Supporter

    That kit has had many lives. It'a been a machine shop for Pola, AHM, Tyco:[​IMG]


    I have an unbuilt version of that kit, as a pickle factory:
    [​IMG]

    I've seen variants of that building from AHM, Tyco, and IHC as part of Grusome Casket Company:
    [​IMG]
    You can find buildings at shows and sales in all conditions. I once found a building that had been assembled with hot glue! It wasn't hard to re-kit it. I have a bunch I've tried to fix and modify, not always successfully.
    I did find a couple of buildings at Goodwill, of all places, very well put together and painted. One was DPM Shultz's garage, but with added raftertails and doors open. $.99 it was a bargain.
     
    Last edited: Aug 5, 2020
    skyraider, geep07 and Joe Lovett like this.
  4. patrick flory

    patrick flory Member

    93679B0A-1A76-4A30-A5A6-33D68324A42B.jpeg 8EC84BE5-ACC5-4E5D-88A5-5B7DBEE7B52D.jpeg The other half of the casket company has been a Western Union office and a meat packing plant, by all the usual suspects. I made it into the railroad hotel/bar at the interchange. This building has really good bones too.

    Removed window muntins and thinned out the remaining ones, took off the diagonal column braces and the cowboy horse hitching rails, and painted it brick red with dark green woodwork and millwork. And put some shades in the windows.
     
  5. skyraider

    skyraider Member

    Thanks, Gary. Now I know what the machine shop started life as.
     
  6. patrick flory

    patrick flory Member

    There’s many of these long standing roaming plastic kits with good bones that are great with a few mods if you don’t mind not following an actual prototype.
     
  7. skyraider

    skyraider Member

    If you look at my layout, you'll see that I'm not a rivet counter!! The town names will have fictitious names; there are locomotives that didn't exist (QA&P 2-6-6-2), etc. I'll keep looking for a few more of these good, basic plastic kits for kit bashing.
     
    Ozarktraveler likes this.
  8. patrick flory

    patrick flory Member

    If it’s ok, I’ll suggest a few. I’ve already done a fairly deep search of these kits
     
    Joe Lovett likes this.
  9. skyraider

    skyraider Member

    Absolutely.
     
    Joe Lovett likes this.
  10. patrick flory

    patrick flory Member

    The Heljan freight station. This one, another rescue dog, I think looks a lot like a produce loading place for watermelons maybe. All I did was paint it better and rebuild the beat up columns. I tried to get the skylight off but couldn’t. The standing seam metal roof is nice and if I’d tried harder I would have covered the skylight with corrugated metal roofing and put louvers on the side to turn it into a clerestory vent. The freight door and window could have been replaced with better if they hadn’t been put in with a whole tube of cement. I was doing the club a favor and at some point enough work was enough.

    This one too got sold off by my former club. I do have a kit to build it again.

    AE376EC2-818B-4DDA-B018-EFE56BD12A5F.jpeg
     
    Last edited: Aug 4, 2020
    Ozarktraveler and Joe Lovett like this.
  11. skyraider

    skyraider Member

    Actually, this would be a good kit for the dual gauge portion of the layout. There will be a transfer station for loading from narrow gauge box cars to standard gauge. All you really have to have is a covered pavilion without the building. But the enclosed portion could be temporary storage. A photo of what I envision is attached. transfer.jpg
     
    Ozarktraveler and Joe Lovett like this.
  12. patrick flory

    patrick flory Member

    Or you could get two kits. Combine the sheds into a long one and then make a long building or two smaller ones.
     
  13. skyraider

    skyraider Member

    If the layout was larger that would be a great idea. As it is, you could remove the building portion and add another set of timber supports.
     
  14. patrick flory

    patrick flory Member

    I don’t have a picture of the actual rescue dog I saved for the unappreciative club, but here’s the Life Like kit. The same treatment as the others- trimming out almost all of the oversized muntins and painting all the milkwork, doors and windows the dark green color common at the time on brick buildings, remove the extraneous roof gable and reroof the whole roof with corrugated metal, paint the building dark brick red and weather it. The freight doors could stand replacing but I couldn’t get them out. I also added a long corrugated metal awning over the trackside platform. It ended up hiding the work I’d done on that side but so what. Would like to have kept this one too. I hope those dogs got good homes.

    All these buildings got painted with hardware store spray bombs. They weren’t worth the time and trouble of an airbrush.

    upload_2020-8-4_8-18-57.jpeg
     
  15. patrick flory

    patrick flory Member

    I may have posted these before, forgive me for repeating if so. When you get old like me you start slipping.

    I hope you don’t mind me putting this in. It’s a really great example of a European building that can be made usable on an American layout.

    This one was in the box of wrecks thrown at me by the club as a good natured challenge.

    It started out as the Faller “Bahnhof”
    (Train Station in German) but with a Robin Hood Merry Olde England half timbered second story, unable to be Americanized. After a very long period of pondering, I realized that the first story and the roof were actually pretty good. So off came the second story. The first story got the now familiar trim out treatment of the windows, brick red paint, and dark green windows and doors.

    The roof gables remained open however, and a good job would have installed weatherboards with attic vent louvers. But I wasn’t doing a totally good job and knew it. So I put some cardboard in and let the next guy have something to do.

    Painted the platform gray. Set the roof on, put a crummy Walthers order board out front, and that was that.

    Does it have any kind of a Frisco look? I don’t know. But it does favor the IC or the GM&N in a generic sort of way.

    This is yet another I should have kept. I hope it too now has a good home somewhere. It was too big for my layout anyway, I crammed it in trackside for the photoshoot then took it right out.

    This is the end of the rescue dog story. I did some others that were mostly repaints of DPM stuff that someone had painted with Testors high gloss airplane reds, greens and such, “why” do people do that?

    Some warehouse related stuff is coming, as promised.

    Maybe we ought to move all this to a new kitbashing thread and get back to Paul’s actual great layout.

    Faller Bahnhof:

    upload_2020-8-4_9-22-17.jpeg


    Americanized:

    8E1BF9FB-843A-4B0F-8F8F-758D98E7D521.jpeg
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Aug 4, 2020
  16. skyraider

    skyraider Member

    ok...a couple of more buildings are nearly done. The Zeke's Place idea came from 1) the name of my dog (he's gone as of Apr 17. Besides my wife, he was my absolute best friend in life. He was 15 years and 8 months when we had to say goodbye); 2) a bar in Victor, CO. A photo of the bar is attached. It looks nothing like the model, but i liked the model (cheap resin kit--can't remember which kit). The sign is homemade. It's a little too large. Oh well...The sign bracket is nothing but a piece of brass wire that I shaped and soldered.

    The second model is my first experiment with paper kits. It needs steps onto the porch, some clutter and some weathering. It will be in an out of the way rural spot on the layout. My wife came up with the idea for a fresh produce stand. IMG_4374.JPG IMG_3770.JPG IMG_3771.JPG zeke's place.jpg IMG_3776.JPG
     
    Joe Lovett likes this.
  17. patrick flory

    patrick flory Member

    Paper kits? How do they get the depth and relief in the door frame?

    Where can you get them?
     
  18. skyraider

    skyraider Member

    Some have relief; some cause to see what's not there by the colors. They do a pretty good job. Some create relief with layers of paper. The doors and windows are glued inside the walls. You use some wood to add to the realism. Here's a link to the free ones I have found.

    The one in the photo is simply a flat paper front that creates the illusion of 3d with the ink. I made the sign in photoshop.

    https://www.krafttrains.com/Paper_Struchers_for_Trains/HO/

    Another link:

    https://www.modelbuildings.org/

    Most cost something and you need a high resolution color printer to print them out. They're pretty simple. My plan is to use the paper kits in out-of-the way places where they are partially hidden so you can't see the shortcomings.

    If anyone has interest in the paper kits, I could start another thread and give a few basic ideas on how to create nice models.
     
  19. Joe Lovett

    Joe Lovett Member

    You could easily scratch build the transfer station. On a sheet of graph paper draw the basic size of deck and put straight pins down one side of platform. Then place a 0.060 to 0.080 styrene strip and put more pins to hold it against the pins at edge. Repeat the process until you have the width wanted and add cross beams every 15 feet with 0.100 to 0.125 square styrene. Then make a drawing of the bents and use the same material to build the platform supports and overhead structure using pins to hold. I used fine grit sandpaper for the roof material.

    Here's a photo of my Blue Ice Inc loading platform that I scratch built using the process above.

    Joe

    20200804_143058.jpg
     
  20. skyraider

    skyraider Member

    That may be the route I take, Joe.

    Thanks!!
     
    Joe Lovett likes this.

Share This Page