February 2011 Article

You'll notice the view is looking eastward along the James River Division main line at Warren. In the view there are several structures which can easily be set in a model layout. For example, the house and garage at the right of the photo could be portrayed by Walthers Cornerstone Series 109 Elm Street, shown here. While not an exact match for the structure, the orientation of the house and garage can be set to fit this building that also served as a storefront. Beyond the station (which I'll return to in a moment) you can see another building and this looks to be aligned to the roadway that runs North-South just east of the station and crosses the tracks between the house and garage at the right in the photo. The next structure to use is the Finley House #625 from Laser-Art Structures by Branchline Trains which possesses a rather simple view of a standard home from the era modeled. As there are several small structures related to the railroad as well as signals, power poles, telegraph poles, and miscellaneous signage in the area, many small kits/structures will be adapted to fit the locale and best represent Warren. Out of view of the photograph, but seen in diagrams of the area is a watertank. Fortunately, many of the details are available by reviewing documentation such as the 1937 reprint with updates of the Side Track Record/Charts (Book of Charts), C&O Railway Co. Side Track Records/Charts; Alberene Subdivision. (available from the Chesapeake & Ohio Historical Society at http://chessieshop.com ). Here the track plans for the area are clearly shown at 1937 but with good representation of the existence many years before of the manner they were constructed. This also shows where the water tank existed which would be North of the depot and could be represented by the Walthers Cornerstone Series of "Built-ups" Wood Water Tank which is available in Yellow Ochre, Cream, or Gray siding (where the Gray siding would be appropriate to the one at Warren). There are other structures that could be included in the model, but the intent is to get the feeling of Warren and not the complete detail of every rock or brick that was present at any one time. So this brings me to the depot itself. While there is an excellent model of the standard C&O station of the period that notably fits the depot in Esmont, the Warren depot is quite different and uses a hip roof rather than the gable roof from standard buildings. There are multiple kits for stations/depots, but none seem to fit this particular structure. But, to get a close model, I thought scratchbuilding would be a good option. Doing some searching on the internet for scratchbuilding materials, I came across, King Mill Enterprises, LLC which happens to be based in Charlottesville, Virginia. They have a trademarked system called Kit-O-MatTM which allows you to 'build' a paper model of a structure. So, I'm now experimenting with this and hope to construct a suitable hip-roof station with the assistance of some building materials and Grandt line parts that are in my collection of unused kits/parts. I'm enjoying building Warren as it leads into the segment that lets me build Esmont. On the way I'm including the little passenger shed at Boiling Springs that was also found athttp://chessieshop.com and is quite inexpensive to add the detail along the tracks that make the simple road crossing there take on new character. ^^ In the next segment I'll show you how the rebuilding of my two Esmont modules took shape to allow the track to travel underneath the low end of Esmont and curl around to rise 12 inches and be the focal point of activity with a depot, ice house, multiple houses, a gas station, and several businesses.

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