Cathead

Love it. I'm a firm believer in doing what "looks" right at times, rather than just what "is" right.

Just added to the pot.

Thanks, Robert! I'm curious what specific ideas you've found useful?

And here's the more or less finished building temporarily in place, just so you can see the context. Still a variety of small details to add, like a main sign on the front, maybe a few posters on the wall, etc. There will be another similar storefront between this and the backdrop. I did a bit of weathering on the walls to break up the smooth paint scheme. I like the "alley" behind this block of buildings and the leatherworks. Gives this area a bit more urban feel and helps with the transition from upscale commercial into the more industrial depot district. And here's a closeup. The sidewalk is just set in place, it'll be painted/weathered appropriately. But this shows how the interior helps; you can see some details of the store and even the proprietor. Much better than an empty box, with this many large windows. I'll use more scenic materials to blend all these buildings in once they're done. But it's nice to start getting this end of town filled in.

Nailed it! Well, glued it I assume. Wonderful job.

I agree, it's just as exotic for me to visit family in small-town Germany and see nothing but stone/block buildings with plaster coating. Many buildings in Rocheport (both in reality and in my choices) have a "Western" feel. That's in part because such designs were far more widespread in the country, but only really get featured in media in "Western" films, so they feel like they should be out in Colorado or Montana. Ironically, this kit was based on a real building from Colorado, but the architectural style is perfectly reasonable for Missouri as well, especially around 1900. And yes, I don't know why they didn't design it as an insert. I did do some of the interior detailing before assembling the "box", but it was really limiting to know that I couldn't do more because of the way the walls were designed. This building will be paired with another similar storefront style, from a different manufacturer, so that will give us all a decent comparison of kit style. It's worth remembering that Rocheport was not a "railroad town" in the sense of springing up along the line, as so many did. It was long established by the railroad came. Founded in 1825 as a river port and some of the core buildings date back to the 1830s. By the 1840s and 1850s it was a bustling steamboat port, I believe with a higher population than when the railroad came through in the mid 1890s. So while the town certainly reoriented itself around the railroad when it came, and I'm sure some new buildings were built, it was quite established by then. So it's safe to assume that most commercial buildings like this one well predate the railroad, as opposed to new constructions like the depot or grain elevator that came with the rails. You'll see that I'm planning to weather this building as a well-kept but long-established store. The commercial core of Rocheport, with its stone and brick buildings, was several blocks inland from the railroad and river, well behind where my backdrop lies. I decided not to move that district forward into the visible area, instead staying more true to reality where wooden buildings dominated this close to the river and the rail line skirted the edge of that district. So stores like this are meant to represent the outermost parts of the business district, not the core. You can see this in the historic photos I've shared in the past. Thanks for the interesting and thoughtful comments, and for all the likes!

Yet another building! I'll do something else at some point, I promise. This one's a kit from Banta Modelworks. Follow the link if you want to see their version. I've never built something from this manufacturer before, and I have mixed feelings. Nice quality materials, but the instructions are poorly written and organized, and the design of how the kit is meant to go together isn't very intuitive to me. There are a couple design choices I'm not a fan of. Anyway, here's the first part of the build. You start by building an interior frame of thin plywood, onto which you'll attach final siding. The latter two photos above show two stages of building up fancier trim detail on the front. Right away this shows something I'm not a big fan of. It's hard to clamp outer sheets of details onto the inner plywood while glue is drying, when you've already built the inner structure. Especially because the kit assumes you've attached a floor already, so you can't access the sides from the bottom with clamps. And especially because all these sheets are super thin and prone to warping. Sharp eyes will have noticed an interior. Sure enough, I went all out on this one. It has big open storefront windows that make an interior almost mandatory because it's so easy to see in. And this is another frustration, it's very hard to add an interior when the design forces you to integrate the floor into the walls within the initial box, so you have to add all the details down through two storeys of wall. Also, there's no provision in the design for the interior walls to be finished, they're just bare plywood with obvious grain and laser burns. The way the windows work (we'll get to that), it's not easy to add an interior layer of paneling. I decided that this would be a grocer, general merchandise type store rather than the manufacturer's bank. Partly because the only bank in Rocheport is a very distinct stone building that I don't want to scratchbuild, and in any case is set several blocks farther back, well behind where the backdrop is. Whereas a general merchant is a fun interior to do and I can name it for one of the many known businesses shipping with the railroad. So here's the interior I put together, using wood scraps and various details from my scrap/parts box. I really like how this came out. I drew the vertical interior paneling (and the floor boards) on with a pencil, figuring that it made decent boards and also broke up the lines of the existing plywood patterning. Here's another annoying thing about this kit: it's a two-storey building and they assume you'll put in the central floor/ceiling, but that would make it even harder to add an interior. There's no provision for access. So I just left out the interior floor. After some experimentation, I actually don't think it's visibly missing from normal viewing angles given the arrangement of the upper windows. Later on you'll see another adaption I made to help with this. Leaving this out also lets more natural light fall into the lower interior so more of the details can be seen (I'm not adding lighting). After that, it's a slow process of building up three layers of very fine detailing on the front windows/doors, and adding general sheets of scribed paneling around the rest of the walls. All of the windows and doors are made off-model from multiple layers of fine parts, which is no problem. But here's the next annoyance: they expect you to insert all of these from the inside, with glue, after all the walls are built into a tight box. That was incredibly fussy to do, and there are some frustrating glue spots on the glass where I didn't do it perfectly. Most kits I've built do one of two things: make the windows and doors insertable from the outside, or design the kit so inside-mounted details happen before you assemble the walls. This was another case where leaving off the interior floor/ceiling was the right move; following the kit design it would have been glued in before needing to insert the windows from the inside, meaning some kind of crazy tweezer manipulation. No, thanks. But after a lot of careful fussing, and tweaking my approach to minimize the risks of these odd directions, I came out with a pretty nice result. Also, I forgot to mention, I pre-airbrushed all of these parts on a warm day, so they could be assembled with minimal further touchup. Here's the finished shell, sans roof, pre-weathering: For all the fuss, it's coming out pretty well. I like my muted but notably distinct color scheme, intended to make this building a centerpiece of the upscale part of town. You can definitely see a nice swath of the interior through the big lower windows. Next step is to make the roof, which won't be so bad. I'm planning to make it removable, though the kit assumes you'll glue it on. This is another way to show off (and repair?) the interior details. You may also have noticed that I built in an extended base, visible as raw wood in the photos above, that will get painted and detailed as a grey block foundation over which I can blend scenery materials without affecting the actual siding. The kit doesn't have a base, just a very thin (and warpable) plywood floor. This thick wooden base really stabilized the structure. Soon I'll finish this and post more photos, including in place on the layout. In the meanwhile, hope you all enjoy some holiday time however you see fit!

Lucky you that the original railings had a nice square corner instead of following the rounded forward edge of the deck! Looks great.

Nice progress! Love the anvil.

Just occurred to me to wonder if the forward sheer on the boiler deck seen on many steamboats derived, in part, from the basic design that had the fireboxes facing forward and little to no infrastructure blocking them. They needed a lot of air for the fire and draft in the chimneys, and that came in over the bow. Did the boiler deck flare upward to help "scoop" a bit more air in toward the boilers? And once that design got stabilized, it just stayed that way even as steamboats got more complex and tended to build infrastructure in front of the fireboxes? It's certainly more aesthetic that way, since it parallels the natural upward sheer of the bow, but I hadn't thought about the possibly functional role related to the firebox.

Hurricane deck is one of the many steamboat terms whose absolute origin is lost to history and almost certainly developed organically and colloquially. Like Texas deck (the one above, when present), and why the boiler deck is the one above the boilers. You'll find many sites repeating the claim that it's because the hurricane deck was especially windy, being high on the vessel and generally unprotected. I can easily imagine being up on that exposed deck/roof, several stories above the water, and feeling like I could be blown off by a strong gust. Not much to hang on to up there in many vessels, not even a railing. And many steamboats had at least a bit of upper deck sheer forward. Peerless certainly did, on the Missouri River. This is just the boiler deck, but if she'd had a forward hurricane deck it would have had to follow suit:

What an absolutely glorious build! And you've persevered through some truly challenging times. Without exaggeration, I think this is one of the coolest models I've ever seen on MSW. I've seen enough of these in real life to enjoy just how well this captures the real thing. And it's such a unique and distinct subject, so well captured. Thank you so much for taking all the time to keep this log maintained. I'm going to miss this build and very much look forward to whatever you decide to try next.

I dunno, I see a Keith-style tugboat in the background! Or that one too normal for you?

Thanks to both of you for your enthusiastic interest in figuring out more about the barn's history and use! Discussions are useful even when I stick to my guns. And I very much appreciate the ongoing interest and curiosity this project generates.

Ken, I've considered that approach. I've seen it used elsewhere and my club layout will be doing that in various settings. I think for the windmill it wouldn't make sense for a couple of reasons. One, if you look at its height, it's way taller than a railroad signal, it would be closer to 4-5" and that'd be a very tall and distracting plexiglass panel, even clear. Just as likely to catch an elbow as the windmill itself. Two, while signals obviously have to be in place along the line and thus need protection, a windmill is just a scenic highlight and could easily be removed during operations with no loss. So I think that's the easier answer in this case.