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Here's a "birds-eye view" of our model, looking from the Southwest. What a
truly "Railroady" structure this is!
As you gaze upon this beauty, notice how the walls, made up of old cross-ties,
are a scale thickness? You'll accomplish this by laminating three sections of
1/32" bass plywood together. You can't tell it by looking ath the pictues
though, can you ? We did this for two reasons:
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It makes for a super sturdy wall section that will NOT warp with age,
temperature, or humidity...
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It allowed us to have detailed walls, both inside and out, "milling" the tie
outlines and tie plates on the inside; and the tie outlines and centerlines of
where you'll be putting the posts on the outside.
( Yes, we layed out all those posts for you with the laser so you can get right
into building the model, 'stead of spending hours with a ruler and a square!
Speaking for our own selves, of course, this stuff has to be FUN to build, or
we don't want to bother with it! )
If you read the B.S. on Page One, you can skip the following. Otherwise, it
makes for good reading, not to mention stuff for later conversation... I quote:
"The prototype's sand bin was constructed from old ( read: used ) ties. Which,
of course, had notches hacked out to accommodate the no longer existing tie
plates. As you can see, we have replicated this detail in our model kit, as it
would have been an almost impossible task, by hand. But since a laser can only
"cut" a .004" wide swath with each pass; and these notches are .101" wide
by .125" tall, thus requiring 25.25 passes each it turns out that the laser had
to travel 3.15625" per notch. And since there are 300 notches per bin... Hmmm.
That amounts to 7,775 passes, equalling a staggering 78.906 FEET per kit!!!!
Aren't you glad the laser was called on to do it, 'stead of YOU?
Since laser "time" is charged by the minute, it should be obvious that these
seemingly insignificent but dramatic appearing details drove the cost of the
kit up a bunch! Yeah, we could have left them off, but heck, that's what
separates a P-B-L kit from "the other guys", and a "contest quality model" from
other models isn't it?"
Everything you see on this model is included in our kit with the exceptions
being the "black mastic" used on the tarpaper patches, (Jimmy used black
silicone adhesive to represent this. ), and the scale sized "sand", for which
he robbed our bead blaster of some of its not-all-that-clean-anymore
"sand"... Oh. And we didn't include the "weeds" either. Sorry. You'll have to
plant your own!
Click on any of the photos below for more views of this magnificent model!
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