Model Railroad Blog

The General Ship Repair structure is now complete and occupying its spot on the pier. Once the core and the photo wallpaper editing was done, the rest of the structure was fairly straightforward. The only tricky part was dulling down the gloss photo paper without getting a frosty haze in the process. Through trial and error I found that an acrylic dulling spray (Krylon) applied in three or four light coats did the trick. Dullcote didn’t work with this ink and paper combo. With photo wallpaper always test the dulling process on test samples as every ink type reacts differently. With some Dullcote is fine, with others you get frostiness or a color change. Next on the project list detailing the pier.

The roof covers a lot of surface area so special attention needed to be given to getting the coloring right. The base material was Evergreen car siding.

In terms of coloring the order of application was:

-First, the entire surface was painted with Rustoleum light gray primer and allowed to dry overnight

-The next day the entire surface was given a wash of burnt umber artist oils and mineral spirits using vertical strokes. An effort was made to work in vertical streaks. Again, I let this dry overnight.

-I wanted subtle horizontal bands to imply edges to the corrugated metal sheeting so I applied masking tape on the surface and lightly dusted the tape edge with an India Ink/alcohol mix in my airbrush (2 tsp ink/pint). Once I had three noticeable horizontal bands I went over the entire surface again with a dusting of the ink/alcohol mix.

-I masked off a few random panels and painted them either dark gray or light gray primer.

-Finally, I used a mix of brown and rust chalk to add streaks to the lighter panels.

The back side of the roof peak won’t be visible so as I worked I always started the paint steps there to make sure a technique would work before moving to the more visible front side.

Building flats serve a useful operational role when it comes to representing an industry. However, they tend to break down visually when you can’t see most of the structure side. On occasion I’ll get around this by installing small shelf on the fascia so you can add more depth to the structure while still maintaining aisle widths for the most part. Make sure you extend the shelf a little beyond the length of the building for photographic purposes.

With photo laminates, having a solid core is crucial. I’ve learned the hard way that styrene can get “wiggly” over time. For General Ship Repair I built the core using aluminum bar stock. Spacers were placed inside out of 1 x 2 pvc wood. The ends and roof crown were made of .060″ styrene. Roofs have a tendency to sag. Aluminum yardsticks only cost a few dollars, are solid, and easy to cut so I used those.

Here’s the finished core with the rules in place on the roof.

….and here’s a view from beneath. Traditional CA was used for the adhesive. All done. Solid as a rock!

General Ship Repair in Baltimore is a perfect fit for the pier opposite the car float. It’s taken me the better part of the weekend to do the photo shopping of the wallpaper but that part is almost done.