A car barn in 2×8

Posted byTrevorPosted inAchievable Layouts, Layout Design, Layouts I have designed or built, Niagara St Catharines & Toronto Railway in 1:64
All of those freight motors need a place to hang out, right? This overview of my 2×8 foot design is looking southeast. The carbarn – upper left – occupies the east end of the property. Some trees at the near end will help visually balance its bulk. The two track storage yard in the foreground will be an excellent place to display maintenance equipment such as sweepers and line cars. The segment of tall building to the right (south) of the storage yard is the back of a building on Church Street.

It’s been hot here on the Canadian Prairies – unusually so. I beat the heat by hiding in the basement over the past couple of days – and designed the first section of a potential layout based on the Niagara, St. Catharines & Toronto Railway.

Elsewhere on this website, I’ve written extensively about my reasons for choosing the NS&T’s car barn and storage yard on Welland Avenue in St. Catharines as my first foray into traction modelling. (If you haven’t already read that, I encourage you to do so.)

As layout subjects go, this one is quite modest. It’s a single scene, occupying a single city block. Even so, a great deal of editing was required in order to fit this into a manageable size. Not only did I have to compress the length of the city block – I also had to cut down the width to ensure I could reach all areas for maintenance, re-railing, etc.

I may have gotten a little carried away with my mockup, which includes representations of windows, doors, and skylights. But it does give me a really good sense of what the car barn will look like. The small grey structure is a sand house, which the freight motors would have regularly stopped at for the grit needed to help them get a grip on wet rails – especially on the 300-foot climb up the Niagara Escarpment!

In the mid-to-late 1950s era that interests me, the tracks had been removed from the south half of the car barn and that area had been converted into a garage for Canadian National’s growing local and regional bus operation. So it was an easy decision to delete that whole section from my design. I also eliminated some duplicate trackage.

The biggest change was deleting one of the two tracks that enter the yard at the east from Welland Avenue. I just didn’t have the space, and I can operate the layout with a single track here.

The focus of the car barn scene is definitely the sand house. It’s such an oddly-shaped structure – a late addition to the yard, and forced to fit between existing tracks. I really wanted to capture its unorthodox roofline, plus the tight squeeze for freight motors entering the car barn.

Looking southwest off Welland Avenue, from the east end of the yard. With all those windows and skylights, the car barn will require a detailed interior.

My next task is to figure out – roughly – what line poles I’ll need to support the overhead wire in this scene. Then I can transfer the plan from kraft paper to plywood, and build the benchwork. I’m taking this approach for two reasons:

  • First, I want to make sure I don’t put a piece of framing right where I need to install a switch motor.
  • Second, I want to make sure I don’t put a piece of framing right where I need to install a pole.

I like this way this scene is shaping up.

Published by Trevor

Lifelong model railway enthusiast and retired amateur shepherd who trained a border collie to work sheep. Professional writer and editor, with some podcasting and Internet TV presenting work thrown in for good measure.