Structure - Colony Liquor (part 1)

The first building I tackled for the North Menands section was Colony Liquor. Its most interesting feature to me was the boxcar loading dock area, which consisted of part of the rear corner of the building being cut away at an angle and a loading dock installed in the gaping hole. Then, blocks were installed around the door at an angle to frame it. However, above the door the building's walls and roof kept their original shape! The track extended beyond the door only just enough for a boxcar to be perfectly spotted against the bumping post with its doors aligned. If you went too far, you went off the track! I assume the D&H had to extend the siding by 5' to accommodate the transition from 40' to 50' boxcars.

These two pictures from early 1984 show the warehouse. I note that it too, like the Iroquois Millwork building, was painted in a drab green. That color must have been all the rage back then. Note in the pictures how close the boxcar is to hitting the doorway! Beyond the boxcar is another portion of the warehouse that I had to compress in length. In in the distance over the tracks is the expressway that could have been part of Cut Corner.

The shot below, taken in September of 2010, shows how overgrown and grassy the area is now. It is looking North, while the pictures above were taken facing south. 

The doorway in the corner alcove section has since been bricked closed with a regular steel door and a rickety wooden stairway installed in its place. 

The rear concrete block wall was in pretty bad shape. Also, note the wall along the right side of the lower-height roof area has smaller bricks instead of blocks. That is an interesting detail to model.

The northern most wall will be visible from the aisle, and I chose to focus on the truck loading door. I didn't have enough room to model the far portion with all of the windows.

So with the prototype research done, I turned my attention to how I was going to model it. Because of the size of the building, the various types of styrene sheets and molded walls, and tools required it consumed my workbench! The structure was built over the course of a week, with lots of breaks to ponder the next steps so that I didn't "paint myself into a corner" so to speak. 

Because of all of the angles, roof heights, and siding materials I thought drawing up a full size sketch would be too difficult so I roughed out some measurements based on pictures I had and just started building it one wall at a time. That would later prove to be a problem.

Since a majority of the structure is concrete block walls I again used Rix Products #541-1004 wall sections. Though I really liked working with them the last time, they were not a good choice for this building. The reverse side is molded in such a way that you need to install 0.040" thick styrene blocks in the middle of the sections to build up their thickness to match the thickness of the edges. However, when cutting up lots of the small wall sections and joining them together over the course of the building's substructure it gets difficult to make everything come out right. And, if you have to cut the sections midway you aren't left with a clean line because the inner reinforcing 0.040" is visible. 

In retrospect, I should have used concrete block sheets that were much larger and would have required fewer joints. The saving grace is that the most interesting angles of the building, which also required the most difficult joints, face away from the viewer and are nearly impossible to see.

Speaking of which, the prototype pictures showed that the rear side of the building had many old doorways and windows that were filled in with non-matching blocks. It really looks neat to see in person, but on my layout they are not visible at all so I just modeled that side with solid block walls and no "ghost openings." The side of the building did have a truck loading dock, and I installed another of Walthers' modern doors in that opening.

As the building's walls slowly wrapped around the exterior of the structure I had to be mindful of the middle area which featured a lower roof line. While I braced the upper and lower edges with 1/4" thick square styrene, I first had to add the inside walls so that they weren't blocked out by the square bracing. I bought a large bin of colorful plastic clamps for $5 from Harbor Freight and they were very useful here. Keeping everything square and preventing it from turning into a rhombus (I haven't used that word since high school geometry class!) was a challenge. Sometimes, I build my models on oversize graph paper sheets which let me spot at a glance when things are off. Here, I used rulers and squares to double check all measurements.

Large areas that needed stronger bracing were fitted with 45-45-90 degree corner pieces of styrene.

Stay tuned to how this thing gets finished...