. . . you can still plan and design. It's tough not being able to work on things or even just run trains for a while. Now imagine being in college, and living 1000-1500 miles away from your layout for 11 nearly-continous months. Yikes. (For the record, college is fun as hell. So I guess I'll suffer.) I've taken some time the past couple weeks to finalize the plans for two structures that will eventually take up residence on the 22nd Avenue Secondary.
First up is Clarke Components, Inc., a manufacturer of small metal parts. They receive ingots, sheets, and rods of various metals and either melt/cast or form them. They do a majority of their inbound and outbound shipping by rail, and the modeled portion of the structure is the rail shipping and receiving area and short-term inventory storage. The structure is of 1930's-1940's vintage.
From the top. The footprint is roughly 15" x 8". Wall D is angled due to an industry lead in the area, which runs underneath the second floor from Wall A to Wall E. The roof will be tar-paper.
The structure is a reinforced concrete frame with brick curtain walls, and is 7" tall. A Walthers fire escape will be used on the street side of the building. As you can see, I've changed it a bit from the mock-up shown above, as the first floor between the tracks now extends all the way to the street-side edge of the building. Wall D cannot be seen from any viewing angle, so it will be plain styrene sheet, if included at all. The rectangle on top of the roof is the top of the elevator shaft. Because the first floor is discontinuous, the bank of four elevators must be used to bring anything in or out. Not ideal, but the such is the price to pay for building on such a strange lot.
Also ready for construction is the Interstate 33 overpass. (I wear #33 for hockey, but as an added bonus I-33 does not exist in real life and would theoretically fall in my modeled region.) The north-south highway curves to an east-west alignment in this portion of the city, running between 21st Ave. and 22nd Ave. The structure is concrete and was built in the 1970's.
The structure is two adjacent bridges, each containing three 12-ft lanes but minimal shoulders. It is about 12" wide and varies from 4.5" to 6.5" deep, somewhat following the fascia.
The foot of the abutments will be home to some graffiti, much like the other overpass I have already built. The overhead signs were modified from examples in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), which is the nationwide governing document on roadway signage and striping. I highly recommend taking a look at it (it's available for free as a PDF on the FHWA website) if you are trying to build prototypical roads, even if you model an earlier era.
Theres only one more site-specific structure left to plan and that's whatever will reside in the weird triangular space between the food distributor and I-33. But I've got all the time in the world to come up with ideas. I might also try to build some small detail items that I've already planned, but not having any of my tools presents a problem. Who knows.
