Warehouse Kit History

John Socha-Leialoha
April, 2004

Inspiration

The month of March here in the Northwest always has one of my favorite train shows, called Meet 'N March, which is an N-scale show. I usually go to this show with a group of friends, and we also tour some of the layouts in the Portland, OR area.

One of the layouts on tour was Rick Ernest's layout. He's modeling the SDS Lumber Co. lumber mill in Bingen, WA. I saw a mockup of one of his buildings an immediately fell in love with it. I just had to make a kit out of this building, shown to the right.

The barrel roof and open track side were two things that caught my interest. So I set out to create a model of this building with just this photograph and some dimensions supplied to me by Rick.

First Draft

I took some guesses about the interior and trusses in order to create the first crack at a model, and the results are shown on the right. I created internal trusses spaced about 16' apart, and supports on the front space 8' apart supporting a large beam that spans the front.

As you can see, the sides of this building are covered with plywood. As I was to learn later, this is actually a loading warehouse for plywood, and it's attached loosely to a plywood mill.

Prototype Photos

Once Rick saw this first cut of a model, he sent me photographs he took in the '80s and '90s of this building and I learned about what I got right and what I got wrong.

Using these photographs and more, I was able to piece together the interior of this building. I also discovered that the entire building is built on a concrete base, whereas people who had seen this building told me it had a ground-level floor.

So it was back to the drafting table (i.e. computer) to redesign my kit based on these and more prototype photos provided by Rick.

Updated Design in N

Quite often we need to use compression for large structures like this when we build kits. The prototype is 161' wide and 84' deep, which would be 12" by 6". Certainly manageable in N scale. However the dimensions I got from Rick were 98' by 69', so these are the dimensions I used for the model (I got the true dimensions later).

The interior and front wall bracing are now very close to correct for the prototype, and in fact I was just about ready to ship this. I just had one nagging question: how do they get the plywood into the warehouse?

It turns out there is another door on the back wall at the right side of this structure. And there is a concrete ramp inside leading from the platform height to ground level. Ah ha, one last detail to model before I release this kit.

Once I had this photograph, I gave SDS Lumber a call and learned even more. This building was built in 1946 and is used to load plywood into double-door box cars, as shown in my photograph. What I didn't know, because I didn't have enough photographs, is that there is a door at the back of the building, and a ramp in the concrete foundation, that allows fork lifts to bring plywood into the building.

HO Design

Next it was time to create the HO version of this model. A true scale model would be a whopping 22" by 12". All the modelers I talked to said this was too large for many layouts, especially if I decided to include the plywood mill as well.

I turned the compression crank and built several test builds to see how it would look. I didn't like the look of the first model because it was too compressed. The final model conveys the feel without being too large at 11" by 7".