An O&W freight bound for Maybrook has just cleared the East Main St.
crossing in Middletown and is rattling the windows on the M&U's station.
Editor's note: Because of personal commitments, Don Spiro could not write his column for the May, 2000 issue of the Mountaineer Newsletter, but he thoughtfully recruited John Deserto to pinch hit.
After accepting Don's offer to write a column on modeling, I actually started thinking about what I could talk about. Typical for me, speaking before thinking. After some thought I figured I couldn't get into too much trouble talking about what I know about, the Middletown and New Jersey Railway and its predecessor lines. Then the thought was how to include the Ontario and Western angle and modeling. Well, the East Main Street station in Middletown was built by the Oswego Midland in 1872 and was used by them, the New Jersey Midland, the Susquehanna, and the Middletown and Unionville, and the M&NJ is still headquartered there to this day. I have made two models of the station already and am planning on making a third, so I had my subject area.
As for the topic, I thought it might be interesting for fellow modelers if I shared my journey into scratchbuilding this unique structure. Chris D'Amato and Ray Brown wrote an excellent history of the building as part of the Railroad Model Craftsman series on the M&NJ in 1988-1989, which is available from RMC (Nov. '88 Vol. 58 #6) and reprinted on the web sites of both the O&W RHS and the M&NJ Society mnjrhs.railfan.net . I model the Middletown and Unionville Railroad in the 1930's-1940's and the East Main St. station was right in the middle of a railfan's paradise. The two-track O&W main from Cornwall was almost under the eaves of the station on the east side, then the M&U main was under the eaves on the west side of the building and finally the doubletracked Erie mainline passed a few feet beyond the M&U main also on the west side of the building. It was obvious that this station would be the focal point of the Middletown area on my layout, and it needed to be as accurate as possible. Not necessarily being a masochist, I scanned the catalogs for a kit that would be appropriate, with no luck. Scratchbuilding seemed to be the only option. I had scratchbuilt only two other structures, the Slate Hill Depot (thanks again to RMC) and the Slate Hill Feed Mill, and found it very enjoyable. These were fairly simple structures that had windows and doors that could be represented by Grandt Line castings. A quick look at the plans in the RMC article and pictures of the Middletown station I've taken over the years showed that this shouldn't be a tough project, except for the arched windows and doors.
Windows and doors in a building have a powerful impact on the overall appearance of a structure. The East Main St. station windows are a unique "shallow arched" design. The arch at the top only raises 4-6" above the horizontal, just enough to be noticed as curved, but not the full half circle that is commercially available. While not 100% sure of this, I suspect these were replacements installed by the Susquehanna during their operation of the line. Several other S&W stations in New Jersey have this same type of window.
I had procrastinated about this problem for quite some time until it became fairly obvious the magic fairies were not coming to make my windows and doors for me. So began the foray into RTV
(Room Temp Vulcan) molds and casting. Others have written how-to articles on this so I'm not going to review that. I will say that once I had summoned up the courage to jump into this, I really enjoyed it. Plan on screwing up at least once. There is some RTV in a landfill someplace that is still trying to harden. Once I got the hang of the casting process the pile of acceptable windows and doors grew pretty quickly. When building the mold masters I included the wainscoting under the windows as the window trim pieces extend down to the ground and incorporate the wainscoting below the windows.
Right Photo:These rough castings are right out of the mold and will need some cleanup before being used.
This simplified the fabrication of the sides later. I think the best lesson for other modelers would be to avoid procrastination about learning a new method or technique. I now actively seek out things I would like to cast (some D&H Canal snubbing posts that were used by the O&W as mileposts are planned for this summer). I also wish I had those years back as this problem seemed to sap my energy from developing the Middletown section of the layout. In most cases procrastination costs more than materials and experience.
With the custom cast pieces out of the way, the rest of the construction was straightforward, but I did run into one other out-of-the-ordinary situation. The Evergreen board and batten sheets, part #F-2, are not long enough to do a whole east or west side in one piece, so I decided to make the splice between sheets at a window. This would minimize the length of the splice and be concealed by the window. Another plus to this was that the roof overhang would come down and cover the rest of the splice, thereby making an absolute minimum exposure of the joint. The drawback is this is not a real rugged way of joining two pieces of plastic and an Alumilite window casting, but this building was not going to be handled a great deal so I chose the best looking joint. If this was a splice on a caboose or some other operating model I would have planned the joint between windows that would have allowed plenty of room to reinforce the joint with plastic on the inside. This is why I like scratchbuilding: I can control everything about the finished product.If you have never scratchbuilt anything before I strongly recommend it, especially since there are so few O&W structures available commercially. Buildings are probably the easiest things to build as they don't (usually) have any curves and don't have to operate. All you need is some plastic, a scale ruler, and a knife. A small "T" square is also a very handy device that speeds layout and cutting the ends.
I hope this convinces some members to immortalize more O&W structures as they find that scratchbuilding a structure can be a fairly low-impact, inexpensive project that results in something that rivals that brass Y-2 in the "pride of the layout" category, because you built the whole thing.
