Monday, May 2, 2011

Fodder Store

In doing the research (such as it was) for the cattle dock, I noticed that a lot of cattle docks (at least the majority of the few I found on the web and in my books) had a building near by which was described as a fodder store.  These buildings tended to be reasonably small and windowless and, while there may have been caption errors, it made sense to me that there would be somewhere near to the dock to store at least straw or hay to be able to put down in the pen prior to the arrival of the beasts - or it they were going to be placed in the dock for a spell from travel.

Now while Swallow's End is not somewhere where a load of cattle would need to be taken off the train to be fed, breaking their journey, it was the fact that a terminus like Moreton Hampstead had such a building which prompted me to have a go.

Attempt 1 was built using some styrene chamfer board I purchased by accident (I was looking for v-grove and picked up the wrong thing).   I painted it cream then weathered it reasonably heavily - assuming that it was either long out of use or long uncared for based on my 1960s time period.  However, when it came to the roof, I decided that putting slates on was the wrong move.  First of all, I am not sure that a slate roof would be held up too well by a chamfer board building (although I guess there is no reason why it wouldn't) and in any case, it was judged too Australian.  So I will take the slate off and put corrugated iron on it and put it aside for a future Australian themed layout.

So back to the drawing/cutting board.  This time I decided on a brick building and used the Scalescenes aged red brick as the covering of the styrene building - and getting a bit more confident with this scratch building game, put a hip roof on.

With management out this evening I will see about siting this on the layout and post a picture later - kids willing...

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