Cathead

That's a really fiddly shape to work with and I can see why you've made a few tries. This one certainly looks like it's on the right path.

Very interesting start to this model so far, looking forward to your unique take on it.

This looks like a great start so far. Very neat detail work on the planking.

Welcome! Looking forward to seeing your progress. If I wasn't deep in another project this would be at the top of my list.

Any further progress on this build?

Great start! And I absolutely agree that this is, by far, the most accurate riverboat model kit out there. Most of the rest are toys in comparison. I'm looking forward to following along and seeing how you make this your own. If you want some extra guidance and insights, @kurtvd19 offers a really nice extended guide to this model. I haven't built Chaperon but purchased this guide anyway as it's extremely useful even for other riverboat builds.

OK, here's this pair of buildings set loosely in place, with their wooden sidewalk. These aren't attached permanently and I haven't done any blending of scenery around them or the sidewalk, but this gives the visual context of their setting. You can see how the drugstore building sort of hides behind the other one, but I want that other one in the foreground because of the larger windows. At least that's been my assumption. Two more views: This shows how you can see enough of the interior to tell it's not an empty box: And a view from the back, with a nice alley:

Kudos for confronting that challenging question and coming up with a solution that's best for you. I agree that I really like the look of "dockyard" models and they have the advantages of display efficiency and easier viewing of deck details. Arguably they're also easier to keep clean (or to clean). I think you can be justifiably proud of this result and enjoy displaying it! Thanks for sharing the journey.

Kurt, good point. I meant the color palette used overall; no paints were directly mixed to create custom shades. I usually don't mix paints for that exact reason! Poor phrasing on my part and thanks for checking on it. You're correct that I haven't kept a record of which paints were used on which buildings, though, and that's not a bad idea. That'll also be an issue on future sections of the layout, as I made several seat-of-the-pants, on-the-fly color mixes for things like scenery and backdrop, and did not keep records of what I did. So it'll be fun to try and recreate those closely in a new scene! At least in those cases there's no direct overlap so a subtle change won't matter, unlike touching up a specific spot on a model.

Mrs. Cathead gets some credit here as I consulted with her when picking out those colors. She has a good eye for this sort of thing (also very good at flower arrangements) and is also a good reference for how a non-modeler sees a scene. We went through my paint collection in comparison with the other building (which I chose the palette for on my own) and she guided me toward that mix, which I hadn't initially considered. I agree I'm very pleased with it and am mildly disappointed that this is a semi-hidden background building (you'll see what I mean in a future post). Only a handful, but it's a fun quirk. I'm glad I'm not doing all of them, and I'm happy with my decision not to light them (which would require more detailed and thorough interiors). It does make an interesting diversion for certain structures. The only one I think I regret not doing an interior for is the depot, and it's too late now as that was another "sealed box" kit. Maybe I'll do a depot interior for McBaine (the next town down the line). Thank you! I've been trying to remind myself to pay more attention to photograph quality at least sometimes. That was taken against the corkboard backdrop of my workbench, which gives a nice neutral background that's well-lit. I think it worked well for the exterior photos, too. Thanks for noticing!

Nice job! It's neat to see this assembly coming together.

Yes, that's very nicely done. Great combination of scavenging and skill!

OK, here's the partner building to the grocer. This one is the "Haberdashery" from Berkshire Valley Models, a kit-maker known to me. I like their kits and as you'll see, this one addresses several of the issues I had with the previous one. Follow the link to see what the default kit building looks like. Right away this gets a big thing correct by assembling the walls ahead of time. A layer of scribed siding is glued onto a sub-layer of thin plywood, but doing it on individual walls means you can clamp these all you want. I added some internal bracing to help ensure flatness. Windows and doors are the usual procedure for kits like this, built up from several layers of thin laser-cut wood. But again, installed ahead of time so it's much easier to get them right. The kit also includes two scribed floors (unlike the other one), which I initially weathered even though I ended up deciding that the upper floor wouldn't be visible. The walls can be assembled into a separate box that sits on the base (meaning it can also be detached), making it much easier to do an interior. I decided this building would be a drugstore. It's a nice complement to the grocer and it lends itself to an interesting interior. Here's a couple of reference photos of period drugstore interiors from Missouri in this era, both from the State Historical Society of Missouri digital collections (public domain, no copyright). The first one is actually from Rocheport's own Dimmitt Drugstore: And this one's from nearby Miami (MO): The key elements here are lots of tall dark wall shelving loaded with bottles and packages, along with prominent glass cases. Some period drugstores also had tables. I had another great reference photo showing a collection of well-dressed ladies and gents lounging around several round tables in the center aisle of a drugstore similar to those above, but I can't remember where I found it, so can't share it here. But here's my version: The tall "walnut" shelving conveys that idea nicely. I built the glass cases from thin strip wood and leftover window glass. The tables are just cut-off dowels. The back wall is affixed to the base. Note how the building base is a nice solid piece, with the floor designed as an inset. This lets the building "box" slide down nice and snug on top, so you can remove the building if you need to mess with the interior. Much better than the other building's integrated floor. This building has only front windows, no large side windows like the other, so the interior really only needs to hint at detail. I think this is plenty. Starting to assemble the "box". The upper floor glues in as part of the structure, but since you can remove the box from the lower base and you can make the upper roof removable, this doesn't matter. I decided I didn't want any part of the upper floor visible, so installed some basic "curtains" behind all the second-floor windows. Here's the partially completed walls being test-fit into the "box", with the companion building next door. Note that all the layers of detail on the front haven't been completed in this view, nor the windows. And here are three views of the finished building: I like how this color scheme came out. Not too bright, distinct from its neighbor, but sharing a hint of the same color palette so they don't clash. I gave this one a generic "drugstore" label. I hadn't found the Dimmitts photo when I lettered this, but even if I had, I wouldn't have used the name since I also found an exterior photo of the real Dimmitt's and it's a brick building. I might letter a more specific name up top, or just leave it be. In a followup post I'll set these two buildings onto the layout with the wooden walkway that goes in front of them. But that's a project for another day. Hope you enjoyed this simple build and thanks for reading along! There are just a couple more buildings to go, and eventually I'll have some more scenery projects to share as well. At some point this winter I'll also start building the benchwork for the next town down the line, starting this whole process over in a new setting! This one will be simpler, as it's a narrower scene with far fewer buildings. But that's in the future.

Looking great!

Gorgeous!

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.