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Valley Creek Passenger Depot Introduction I first put this structure together, I hadn’t settled on the railroad name or location precisely. So, it currently is named “Valley Creek”. Someday, I’ll have to reprint the station sign so it reads one of the stations on the line. In the meantime I’ll use it at Blackhawk until I build a more prototypical replica of the Blackhawk station This station starts from Model Power's ["Silverado Station"] (manufacturer's stock #605). I choose this model because I wanted to work on a few new items: Building Brick Walls Since I'm building a mining road, one of my buildings is a gold smelting operation. Since this building is pretty much all brick, I wanted to "get my feet wet" in building a brick foundation to see if that method would work for a full building or if I wanted to use commercially available brick face sheets over a wood frame. I decided to start with doll house size clay bricks from Houseworks Ltd. [Item No. 8204] and cut them down by hand.  
After experimenting with various methods, I decided that the best way was just to use a pair of diagonal cutters and cut the bricks down by hand (see picture above). The resulting bricks are too big for a scale brick wall (nominally 6"x6"x12") but would work for a foundation. For mortar, I decided to try mixing white Elmer’s glue with light grey sand from Activa Products [Item No. 4488] - their name for the color is "Moonshadow". The resulting suspension of sand in the glue has to be re-mixed periodically to ensure that the sand gets transferred to the mortar. Using this suspension results in reasonably good results for a clay tablet or field stone foundation, but I don't think it will work for a finished brick wall. Oh well, there is always brickface. 
Painting As far as painting are concerned, previous structures that I've built used weathered wood, because they were structures that did not "require" painting. However, buildings like this were ones that were painted and so this building presents the first opportunity to develop some painting techniques. Since I’m still working on airbrushing and because of the size of the items being painted in this structure, I pretty much used a 3/0 brush throughout and the same enamel paints that would be used for a larger woodworking construction. Doors This station had two types of doors: wide sliding doors and smaller "raised panel" doors. For the sliding doors, I built the base of the door using 3"x12" with 2"x2" for the edging. Each was painted separately and white glue was used for the assembly. The picture shows a sample door before and after assembly. 
For the raised doors, I again used 3"x12" for the substrate of the door and the rails and stiles were done with 2"x4" material. Again, each was painted separately before final assembly. 
Walls For the mining and freight buildings, the wall assembly could be done fairly flexibly as a "rustic" look was acceptable. For this station, a more finished look was desired and so the wall assembly was done slightly differently. While the wall is still built around the painted windows, the window is not glued in after the studs of the wall are completed. Rather, the siding is glued on first 
and the window is glued in as the last step to ensure that the outer sill of the window extends to the edge of the siding. Note: if necessary, you can paint additional 2x or 1x material to apply over the window edges to achieve the desired effect. Once the walls were finished, the building begins to take some shape.   Platform The platform for the original station was (in my humble opinion) too small. Therefore, I decided to extend the platform the entire length of the station. This is why the foundation pictured above looks different from the original model. For the platform, I adapted the deck construction method I used for the freight stations and built the deck out of 8"x8" (for the under support), 2"x6" for the cross beams and drainage, and 2"x12" for the top layer. It is attached to the foundation using simple Elmer's glue. In addition, I wanted to add a smaller platform to the back of the building (because it fits better in the yard layout), so I added that and also add two gable awnings to the front and back of the structure and since this is a passenger station, I added a few signs. 
 As you can see, the platforms on both sides act provide me with a "two track station". Finishing up The last step was to add some packages, barrels and tools for "color". See Details for information on how these were built. 
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