Some more shots of the shed in progress.  Cutting out the sides, etc.

Hope gradually came together while other things had to dry or set.  I worked on figuring out grass, roads, housing positions.  I poured the roads using the road mix stuff that WS uses, but the height was too high for N-scale.  I was going to leave it, until an unfortunate incident involving a babysat cat caused the whole thing to end up on the floor.  A few months later, a plumbing leak hit it pretty hard from above, and the roads were totalled.  I’m going to pry them up and try again with spackling.

These are shots of the concrete snowshed from the web, including one showing the shed when it was still in use.  Not being able to visit the site myself, I had to rely on these for information.

The snowshed as it looks more or less now.

Nov 2012 – Okay, here’s a fun one.  Making the concrete snowshed at Mile 28.2.  Had no idea how to approach this going in.  But I wanted it.  It’s the only concrete shed on the KV.  And it’s one of the few structures of the Coquihalla still in existence.  I’ll post the prototype pic above.

This is not a simple piece.  For one thing, it needs to have a semi-circular roof.  It has several openings on the side, which originally were covered by wood slats.  And the whole thing is curved slightly.  It also had wood ends.  The whole shed was wood at one point, but it kept getting destroyed by slides, so they reinforced 100+ feet of it.

The problem was, all I knew of it were the photos folks had taken, a very blurry satellite photo of it via Google Earth, and that was it.  There are no plans.  It would all be guesswork on my part.

The hard part was the roof.  Getting a semi-circular roof that was curved at just the right angle was going to be tough.  I had to guess on the angle – following both the curve of the roadbed and the very faint image of the top of the prototype from Google Earth.

My solution was to break it into components.  I did not have the skill or ability to cast the whole thing as one piece.  I would tackle the roof first, then the sides.  The roof would be a single cast piece.  The sides would be styrene covered with a light coat of spackling, sanded.  The wood slats would be balsa.  Haven’t gotten that far yet, but, that’s the plan.  The wood part of the shed would be a kit made by Timber Mountain from balsa.

First I built a styrene mould.  Then I found some foam pipe insulation at Home Depot, which I could compress to the correct radius.  Because it had a rough foam finish it would leave a pattern in the roof I didn’t want, but I could deal with that later.  I fixed it into the mould, pressing the sides of the mould against it.  The sides of the mould went up a half inch above the top of the foam.  Thus I could pour plaster directly atop it and it would form my roof. I sealed the sides and poured in my plaster mix.  After letting it set, I broke open the mould and was pleased to see the beginnings of my shed.

Next I got out the styrene, and using a rough measurement derived from pictures, began cutting portals.  Next I glued it onto the outside edge of the roof.  I then followed up with thin layers of spackling on both sides of the styrene, letting it dry and then sanding it.    I’d say it came out pretty well!

That’s as far as I got with it before other things intervened.  Have to get back to it soon.

July 2011 – This was a fun one.  One error I made early on in the Quintette section was not accounting for bridge footings.  That necessitated raising the whole model a bit, and then cutting in room.  It also created a crisis because I could not, with my camera, capture the area in a way that the river made sense.  The river between the tunnels is not very wide – about 30 feet, but the half deck plate girder bridge, which goes pretty much right up to the portal in the second tunnel, is 75 feet.  I learned the hard way that you have to account for the slope of the mountain face.  Once I figured that out, and how the side profile of the bridge and river resembled a V shape, it all came together.

Anyway, the footing was a lot of fun.  Using styrene I created a cast, then poured some Faster Plaster in it.. and voila!  Not quite perfectly accurate (the back wings had more of an angle, but since these will be covered by fill, not a big deal).  Really pleased with it.  It’s amazing how small details make things really pop.

Nov 2010 – Work progresses on the scene where my concrete snowshed will reside.  Still figuring out the correct colouring for Coquihalla rock.  In pictures it has a kind of yellowish tinge to it.  Haven’t quite adapted to it as readily as the rock of the canyon where the Quintette Tunnels are.

Oct 2010 – I discover a new trick.  Rather than printing out a mosaic, I make use of my 170″ 720P projector in the rec room, and project Google Earth imagery on top of my foam base, tracing it out with a marker.  Perfect!

First use: the concrete snowshed (still surviving) at Mile 28.2  Thanks to the projector and the fact I was able to do the concrete shed without compression, I was able to almost perfectly match the alignment, figure out where mountains, cliffs, slide areas were.  Then it was just paper mache work and following the lines!