Loading dock

 First up this week, before I get to the loading dock part, is the news that Dave, of the Consolidated Motive Power Services blog, has renamed his blog and his railroad to now be the River Basin Railroad. You'll now find the link to the new site listed in my "Blogs I Like" column over on the right-hand side of the page.  Dave's a great modeler, and chimes in here with a comment pretty regularly.

I thought I'd like to have an open-air loading dock as part of my new industrial building, so I've scratched on together from odds and ends that I had on hand.  Those items being some Evergreen styrene H-column, I-beam, a couple of unused loading docks from previous Walther kits that I used as the base, and a piece of .040 styrene sheet.

Here it is on the workbench, pre-assembly...The "concrete" pad measures 30' x 60'.

I used the back of an Xacto knife to scribe the grid marks into the styrene sheet.  The pad was sprayed with ModelFlex Concrete Gray.  Some of the squares were masked off and sprayed with light coats of Craftsmart Gray just to add a bit of variety to the colour. Once everything had dried, I coloured in the scribed cracks on the pad using a .005 diameter black pen. If you look closely, you can kind of see dark shadowy areas I sprayed to represent marks left by forklift tires that lead from the front edge of the dock to where the entrance doors to the main building will be.

Above is the nearly done loading dock, with the steel frame painted in primer red, and a few crates pallets, and barrels added.  The bottom 4 feet of that front column has been painted safety yellow so a fork lift driver is less likely to bang into it.

 Out in the real 1:1 world, down at the Sarnia "C-yard" 2 Sundays ago was this tagged, rusty and patched 3-bay covered hopper. The randomness of the graffiti and rust colours nearly camouflage the freight car as it's behind the tall brown grass in the foreground.This one even still has it's old ACI tag.

And phjoto taken the following day, this bulkhead flatcar of aluminum ingots was sitting in "A-yard".

This might make for an in interesting modeling project one day.  The orange coloured straps are also quite appropriate for the season.