The Pink House

 

Not much to report this week, other than filling the spot between the service station and the rest of the town with a tiny version of the pinky/red house that lives in the real Wassen.

This is a small space, so the house was and simplified (a lot) and shrunk (a lot) to fit. I probably made it a little bit too small, but the important thing is that it fills the space and more or less completes that quarter of the town.

I'm torn between building another building next or a new wagon...

Shell Wassen

Today I had a crack at the petrol station alluded to in the previous post, and to my surprise had it glued down within two hours.

The real thing has a wooden upper floor on a concrete block lower, with an angled extension out front that I declined to model, out of both laziness and a lack of space.

For the top half I used some grossly overscale but decent looking faller card sheet, with an overlay of roof-slate-printed Faller card for the bottom concrete blocks. The black bits are for the big windows downstairs.

And overlaid:

The 'concrete block' bits were overpainted beforehand with a light grey so the detail would still show through, and the roof later painted darker, as these were made from the same card material. 

As usual, its all a bit hokey and out-of-square, but it looks OK from a distance.  The canopy sides were painted yellow and some red decal stripes added. I considered putting 'Shell' and Mattli' signs up, but I doubt they would want to be associated with such a crooked model.

Under the canopy are some white pieces of wire poked into the foamboard road and a few bits of plastic rod for petrol pumps. If I wasn't so lazy I would have put some red and yellow on them before sticking them down.

Wassen Gotthardstrasse

 I intended to make the Wassen Shell service station today.

After making a start on the yellow canopy, some time was spent pondering about how big the building should be, and where it should all be located on the layout. 

To do that it made sense to see where the road goes.

To do that I might as well put down the road. 

To do that I needed to put the sidewalk and buildings down. 

So the (incorrect for Wassen) cobblestone sidewalks went in, almost all the buildings on the far side of the road (except the Alte Poste) were glued down, a little scenery was added behind the gaps, and the road went down. A drill bit is holding down the schoolhouse in a near-vertical position.

The main bits of road on this layout were made from Faller Z Scale crepe roading. But that ran out, and it's hard to get Z scale roads here. Here, I used some larger scale stuff, trimmed the width of the side lines and drew in middle lines with a white pencil. This was then extended up towards the right side of the layout, tapering a little at the far end under the church, as that will be hidden by buildings and trees.

The Shell station canopy is the triangley bit. With the roads and basics in place, I can start adding soem more buildings. Starting with the Shell, and probably the obvious pink building in between it and the existing buildings.

As an aside, I see the Alte Poste hotel shut down in 2019 and was for sale. It seems silly, but I expect that a lot of their trade was railfans, so they can probably blame the BasisTunnel for there now being too many rooms in Wassen.

Obere Wattinger Fin

Two outstanding items in the transformed Upper Wattinger corner were some piers/supports for the road bridge, and the little house/track maintainers house/signal house/I'm not sure what these are, but they are littered around the trackage at Wassen.

This hut was made out of some thick white cardboard that was lying around.

A bit of artistic license was employed to have it fit the space available. 

This end (that everyone sees in pictures of the real thing taken from the road) should have a different roof profile and be wider, but had to be condensed to fit the space.

I had a pic of it on my computer and thought it had yellow window shutters and red/orange window sills, so this is what I did, but those bright colours stood out and drew too much attention. 

I pondered this overnight and found another picture with light green shutters and grey sills, so today I recoated these items and it looks a bit more subtle. I don't want any of the horrible bits of the layout (all of it really) to stand out and kick you between the teeth, I'd rather have the trains be the eye-catching elements.

I also painted the 'wooden top floor' parts of the house as it appears in photos. This makes the place look a bit more interesting and less stark white.

As for the bridge piers, I was looking for something with a rectangular cross section to make two columns out of, but unfortunately we don't have a lot of hobby supplies in our town. Then I thought why not use drinking straws. These might have buckled and gotten out of alignment, but even before that fear had entered my tiny mind, I was passing through a local dollar shop when these wooden dowels jumped out at me. Perfect. 

I cut three sections to fit under the road bridge and used two of the (longer) offcuts as spacers between the columns to keep everything separated and parallel while the whole pier was assembled. The three short pieces were glued to a thin strip of card...

And then the card was folded around to form a 'capping' piece. The attaching was done with PVA wood glue, making sure not to get any glue on the spacers. As seen here under a glass of water that was being used to hold the card down while the glue sets: 

The spacers were then pulled out and discarded, and the 'structure' painted with a mix of greys that looked concretey. The piers were glued in and some rocks placed around the base:

The house hasn't been glued down and scenicked yet. 

Wassen Church Chapel

Actually I don't know what the species name is for this little domed dell outside the church door, but it is quite distinctive and had to be added.

Since the Coronawar lockdown ended in New Zealand a few weeks ago, I've only made rare visits to the train room, and none has been terribly productive. But I've contemplated this wee structure for some time and finally bit the bullet yesterday.

A a short piece of white plastic tube was earmarked for the job a year or two ago (and indeed it is probably visible perched forlornly on the landscape next to the church in various pictures that appear amongst the bloggage here).

To make some progress though, a roof was needed and it's a difficult shape. The original idea was to use the rounded top of an old BIC ballpoint pen, but that didn't eventuate, so yesterday I built up a rough knob of plastic stacked up on top of the tube. Starting with a thick plate cut into a rough circle and a few tubes stacked on top, with a square rod sticking out the top.

That didn't look terribly attractive, but was a start. The knob was stuck into a drill and lathed into shape over various visits with a little filler in between.

This turned out ok, so it was hurriedly painted up and glued into place thusly:

Yes this roof is round rather than having flat faces (which I suppose I could have filed into it) but this is close enough from a distance.

Yawn. More buildings

Well this is getting tedious, isn't it?

Nonetheless,  a new pair of buildings have sprouted in the last few days to go to the right of the Alte Post.

The Volg and turret building have also been tarted up slightly with some roof weathering and fascias. The Volg also got a few windows on the side facing the Alte Post just in case someone looks from over there, but alas the grey building didn't receive the same luxurious treatment.

As can be seen below, a start has been made on the huge building to the right of the pic below - I think perhaps an old hotel now an old folks home? At this rate we will have this side of town grown out in no time. Go the Coronavirus!  *

* said in jest of course...

Mini-Gerig

My mini-Hotel Gerig progressed today. Its a little smaller and less windowy than the real one. I handpainted the hotel name.

 And of course I never remember to take these prototype pics that are on my laptop down to the trainroom, so build these largely from memory. This from Google Streetview:

Installed and barely visiblee. The three nearest buildings are just sitting there, but I have installed some (way-overscale) 'cobblestones' around, between and under them:

 Need some more of that road material. Its rather good.

One and a half more Wassen buildings

This is a house that is visible from afar that sits behind the corner turret-building (it probably has a nicer sounding name than that in real life) that was modeled last time. This is a foamboard core with thin card shutters glued on, windows drawn on, and a roof plonked on top. 

 And with a little paint:

It actually looks a bit like the real thing (although I declined to make the fancy roof dormer):

Later I added a base made of 'stone' for it to sit on.

Also, the little garage/stablehouse behind the Alte Post was added. And also visible here is the start of the Hotel Gerig that sits behind it:

Two more buildings - Volg and the Corner Turret.

I've slowly pottered on and built two more buildings over the past few days.

In the real town of Wassen, between the Hotel Alte Post and the Sustenpass road there are a string of buildings. My feeble memory thought there was only one (the handy Volg supermarket where one could grab a banana and a bar of chocolate for the days railfanning and a small bottle of wine or Champers for the evening's piccy-processing) but it turns out there are a string of five of them.... The Alte Post is just to the right of the Volg with a walkway between them.

Such a  pain there is very limited Google Streetview in Wassen. I'd only left space on the layout for the Volg, or at a pinch one and a half buildings, but as there is this rather tasty building on the Sustenpass corner (below),  that deserves to be included:

And that would leave me room for about 60% of the Volg.

And so with much mucking about, the following has emerged. I thought the corner turret might look a little silly in white so I made it yellow to stand out a little. It's all built on a slope because the road outside is on a grade. Artists licence applies in other areas as well...

The turret was made from a Tamiya wooden paintbrush - they are longer than they need to be :)   and have no taper to their wooden shaft. I whacked off the end, stuck it in a drill and applied sandpaper until it conformed to the right shape at both ends. A tiny thin strip of card went around the top to represent rain spouting or somesuch, and more paper was applied to fill in the bigger-than-needed hole in the roof shingles. Just looking at the prototype pic, I need to add a spike on top of it.

As usual things are a little wonky and skonky in places, and they certainly looks far better from across a large room than up close, but it's passable on the layout.

(p.s. none of the buildings in the foreground have been glued down so they all have random leans to them.  Not that I expect that to improve wildly when they are stuck down !

My old iPhone takes a pic at street level...

Hotel Alte Post - 2

This won't be a very informative post, as I didn't take a lot of additional pictures of day two of the Alte Post construction ...as it all came together quite quickly...

Basic side walls and and an even more basic rear wall (brown pre-scribed sheet wood with a (badly cut out - as you can see) stiffening card piece.

You might note that the 'wings' supporting the side balconies - visible in the previous post - were removed - they seemed a bit high-up on the building so I removed them and added them further down the sides to line up with the 'third' floor (as counted by Europeans and others not believing in a 'G' floor)

Yellow coloured pencil was used for the window frames in the lower floor, the window-box flowers were as per the 'Upper Wassen' farmhouses detailed earlier.

The roof was the usual one-piece plastic stone/brick sheet to represent shingles, all folded up and contact glued in place. 

Side steps are a small trapezoidal piece of foamboard with steps drawn on.

I still need to make up a large vertical 'HOTEL' sign on the computer - the other signage and the little Xs on the window shutters were hand-drawn with a fine pigment pen in a fit of lazy impatience. As usual with most of my models, it is the effect of the scene and the illusion of detail within it that I hope resonates, not the individual details (or lack of them)!

 As finished, with various currency for scale:

The general shape (forced perspective narrowness aside) looks quite decent from road level, not that it will ever be seen from this angle on a Z scale layout!

Roughly placed on the layout:

In these pics it seems I should have put more black into my brown-wood mix, as the real Alte Post colour is almost black. Might see if that can be corrected.... 

Hotel Alte Post - 1

One of the most distinctive buildings in Wassen is the Hotel Alte Post.

This was the first place I stayed on my first visit to the town (above), and just had to be included in the sample of buildings that will populate my model Wassen town.

Construction started using the usual random gustimating and drawing and re-drawing of lines until it looked about right, followed by some knifular commitment:

As usual, windows were cut out from the wooden frontage, and a card backing sheet cut so that the windows could be later drawn onto it. This also stiffens up the structure nicely and provides the white concrete lower floor.

Windows (badly) drawn and some details added in a slightly crooked fashion:

Yes, the entrance door is supposed to be offset a bit like this, but I'm a little off on my windows in the floor above (there should be fewer on the left-hand bunch). Drat. Hopefully nobody will notice...

A little paint, and it's starting to look half decent - when viewed from a considerable distance:

More to come... Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.


And a finally, a thank you to Mr Anonymous, who has pointed out that the mysterious building I had labeled the Town Hall in the previous posts is actually a school.  I've since corrected these. Cheers. I'm glad we've finally found a useful use for the internet - sharing information. Apparently it's not just for porn, vanity, scammers and to give vain and vile dickless morons a platform for sharing their hate and stupidity afterall...  RIP the Christchurch 50.