Tenth Avenue and West 27th Street

The block between West 26th and 27th Street West of Tenth Avenue was not on my initial list of locations to consider for my Westside Railroad layout. That was until I came across a fascinating archive photo during my research. The photo from 1939 or 1940 was taken from the corner of Tenth Avenue and W27th Street.

The tax photo from the NYC Department of Records shows a gas and service station on Tenth Avenue in the foreground. The background has several buildings located at W26 and W27th Street. What struck me was the depth of the photo. The ten buildings in the frame are less than a hundred yards away from the photographer. Yet, they appear in such a dramatic buildup as if someone had orchestrated their exact position. I took me a brief moment to decide that, yes, I wanted to include them on my layout. Fortunately, most of the block is part of the West Chelsea Historical District. That status protects the buildings from destruction or even major changes, making is easier for me to research and design them. That block became module 8 of my layout.

Planned Structures

The buildings I have decided to include in this module are, starting in the foreground (the number in parentheses refer to lot/block number in the NYC Dept. of Records’ tax photo archive):

• The gas and service station on 293 Tenth Avenue (698/40).
• The car painting and lettering business Raha-Terry at 289 Tenth Avenue to the left of the gas station (698/37).
• The residential building at 285/287 Tenth Avenue (698/35-36).
• The tiny 3 story building at 502 West 27th Street behind the gas station (698/141).
• The massive 6 story warehouse at 510 West 27th Street owned by West Virginia Pulp & Paper at the time of the photograph (698/44).
• Three factory buildings to the left of West Virginia Pulp & Paper at West 27th Street. These are number 513 (698/27), 515 (698/24) and 521 (698/22) West 26th Street. Two out of them were owned by Harris H Uris Iron Works .
• The 12 story high Wolff (Annex) building at 508 West 26th Street (697/42) that dominates the block. Even though this building is actually on the adjacent module 9, I’ll include it in this post.

As the plan below shows, module 8 is rich in smaller and medium size structures, most of them industrial or commercial buildings. The module size is again 650×400 mm (25×16″). Module 8 is the last one before both the high-line and the street level railroad go into a reverse loop.

Tracks on Module 8

The tracks of street-level railroad are simple for this module. Three straight tracks at the front (right in the diagram) above with right-most being a run-around track. Two thirds down the module width the reverse loop track joins middle track for northbound traffic. This creates a 30 degree crossover the southbound track with a #3 turnout. Using this configuration allows the diverging track to have a slightly greater radius. The resulting 4.25″ radius is still very tight, though. The street-level railroad has no sidings on this module.

The elevated track includes the two turnouts for the diverging tracks that form the reverse loop. Additionally, a siding branches off from the reverse loop creating a third turnout. The plan is to use #5 or #6 turnouts. The siding will serve one of the buildings on the reverse loop module 9.

Turnout and Crossover Design and Construction

While I could use the jigs from previously constructed turnouts, the crossover in this configuration was a bit more challenging. To facilitate the construction of the crossover I created a reverse jig made of 3/32″ basswood. This helped me milling the rails on top and on the foot. There is not much tolerance for errors on Code 40 rail. I had to work the Dremel tool very carefully at low speed under the magnifying glass.

Again, I made all stock rails long enough so that I would not have to splice track somewhere in the middle of the module. This made construction a bit more cumbersome but it paid off at the end when integrating the track work into the roadbed. For the roadway surface I followed my earlier developed calibration for engraving the rail grooves and the space for the flangeways. I left two cutouts in the cobblestone surface, one for the turnout and a second one for the crossover. As I used long crossover PC ties to connect the diverging stock rails to the crossover track, I combined the two cutouts into one large piece.

Once I had completed the crossover, adding the turnout was almost relaxing. I just had to be very careful to cut the curved stock rail leading from the crossover to the frog of the turnout at exactly the right point. But even here I had a fallback in case I’d fail since I’d have to cut a gap close to the frog anyway. Cutting them – three for the turnout and four for the crossover – was again nerve-racking. After all, I didn’t want to weaken the structures or even damage it. I carefully planned the position of the gaps, making sure that I would not cut two opposing gaps between the same ties. Testing at the end went hand in hand with additional filing a milling. I declared the crossover finally as complete when cars ran over it without slowing down or jerking over the frogs.

Laying Crossover and Turnout into Street Track

The next step would be to glue the completed track work into the grooves. Before that I gave the cobblestone trackbed an India ink/isopropyl alcohol wash and some dry brushing with white acrylic paint. Gluing down the rails is always stressful as the entire piece of track must be glued down at once and there’s only limited time to get it right for a nice fit. As the photo shows, I had two 16″ pieces of rail connected by the crossover to glue. I used CA glue this time, hoping that it would result in a much cleaner end result. It worked pretty well so that I could wrap up the track construction.

The last step was to cover the road with a asphalt pavement and to cover the turnout and crossover with cobblestone. After having protected the cobblestone roadbed and patches with (laser cut) painters tape, I applied a very think coating of spackling which I then sanded down and air-brushed with different shades of gray. Covering the cutouts with a precise cut of 1/32″ cobblestone engraved is a time-consuming process. Finding the right balance between enough flangeway for cars to roll through the turnout without friction and a too wide flangeway that compromises prototypical appearance is not easy. Even with the help of a deskewed photo, multiple iterations of cutting, filing and testing are usually required to get all pieces matching. Still, it is surprising to see how well the cutouts integrate. And the few well visible gaps may as well have a prototypical analogy.

Finally, I could move forward building the structures not that I had laid out the groundwork for module 8.

Gas and Service Station

The first one on my list was the gas and service station at the corner of Tenth Avenue and West 27th Street. Details on the existing photos from 1940 as well as the tax record show that this building was new at that time. A real or virtual visit of this location today tells us that the structure has disappeared. Most likely it was replaced instead of just integrated in a new structure as this happened a lot in that area. Interestingly, the tax photo of the lot from 1983 still gives 1938 as the year of construction. The photo at the beginning of the blog and a second photo of 502 West 27th Street are the only sources of information I could find.

Design and Construction

Details on the construction of this structure are scarce with just these two photos. The building appears to have a brick core. White painted cladding covers core on the walls facing the streets but it is not clear to me what that material was. For my model I’m assuming it’s wood. The top part of the structure has a horizontal texture and looks like concrete. For the model I used an MDF core which I covered with lazerboard. For the vertical ribs I used .020 by .020″ scale lumber that I glued into engraved grooves. As tax photo 698/37 shows, the left (southern) side of the building is an unpainted brick wall. I used a 1/32″ brick sheet from MonsterModelWorks glued over the MDF.

Detailing

A Mobilgas / Socony-Vacuum sign on a post located at the SE-corner of the lot tells us that Standard Oil Company of New York was the owner. That company used the shield-shaped sign with the typical Pegasus figure at the center as their logo between 1931 and 1939 (source). I will leave the addition of details such as pump stations, product signs, and other typical artifacts of a service station for now until the module is integrated into the layout frame.

3-Story Building at 502 West 27th Street

For the small residential 3-story brick building there is little archive material available. A comparison of the tax photo from 1939/1940 with the current appearance in the Google Street View (or a real visit of the object) shows that the building has not changed a lot over time. Only the store front has been adjusted to a 21st century style (the building is not part of the West Chelsea Historic District).

To determine proportions I used one of my own photos. For the correct size I used window dimensions as references. The material I used predominantly was 1/16″ MDF except for the front wall where I used 1/32″ brick sheet from MonsterModelWorks. The latter material has a much more accentuated brick texture and looks better for residential buildings than the engraved brick patterns on MDF. The windows and the window frames I cut from 0.017″ lazerboard. The building looks heavily weathered, so I went through several coatings of white paint for mortar lines and Burnt Sienna in various shades to get a realistic effect.

West Virginia Pulp & Paper Building at 510 West 27th Street

The first large commercial structure I’m going to build in this block will be the building at 510 West 27th Street. It was built in 1909/1910 and was one of the few structures to the east of Eleventh Avenue designated as a warehouse from the beginning. The simple cube structure is a brick masonry building with a well preserved facade made of face brick. The tax photos of 1939/1940 show that the building was a warehouse of the West Virginia Pulp & Paper Company. Even though it appears that that company was no longer the tenant in the 1950s, I will use its well visible company sign on the eastern wall.

Compression

The building still exists today in its original size and most likely also in its original design. Surely, some elements of the facade have changed over the last one hundred years, including different windows and the removal of loading docks. But otherwise it still gives a good impression of its original appearance. To fit the building into assigned space I had to reduce its width slightly and its depth considerably. I kept the building height to six stories to make sure I could obtain the desired visual buildup effect of the structures in that block between West 26th and 27th Street. I also tried to keep the proportions of the widths of the two outer to the inner bays.

Getting the correct height was more difficult. Yes, I had the Google street map which gives me a wider angle photo than my iPhone. I ended up having to guess the story height based on estimated window sizes. Not a reliable way to get the correct dimensions, I know. In retrospect when comparing 510 W27th Street to the other buildings on 513-521 W26th Street (for which I had exact plans), the building is probably about 10% too high. Once I figured out the height of the ground floor, the floors above and with that the overall building height I could draw the piers and the window bays. With the absolute dimensions given, I was able to work out the proportions based on a photo that I deskewed in GIMP.

The eastern side wall is simpler with no piers, and its brick quality brick is lower. My compressed design only allowed for 3 windows across from the third to the sixth floor to retain the proportions. The windows are standard size segmented arch windows with radiating brick lintels. The back wall is similar to the eastern side wall. It has more windows, however. Furthermore, a door on every floor leading to a fire escape that reaches from the top to the ground floor breaks the regular pattern of seven windows per floor. An elevator shaft close to the south-eastern corner adds another element of surprise to the otherwise uniform back wall.

Construction

To get a good idea of how prototypical my model of the West Virginia Pulp & Paper warehouse would look I started with the front facade. To facilitate the construction while at the same time improving the stability of the model, I decided to use the floor tabs as lintels for the front windows. This meant that I had to integrate the core support structure with the facade from the very beginning. Combining that structure with elements of the front facade also meant that there was little room for error. But then the laser cutter makes very precise cuts so that this would not become a problem. For the facade, the internal walls and floors I’d use 1/16″ MDF.

As I had done before, I would only design a floor on top of the first, third and fifth floor. The ceiling of the sixth would be the roof. For the lintels of the second, fourth and sixth floor I would just use one inch deep horizontal MDF strips. The building has one well at the center parallel to the walls at the east and west. That separating wall interlocks with the full and partial floors and provides a very strong building core. Outside walls have gaps that snap with the tabs on the floor sheets. To accentuate the piers I glued a second thin layer of 0.024″ lazerboard on top of the walls. Both the MDF walls and the added piers have an engraved brick structure. The added piers also cover the holes for the tabs of vertical dividers.

Internal Structure

The approach to mount walls on the internal structure requires that all layers of a wall be separately painted and then glued together precisely first. For the front facade these were four layers: wall, pier layer, main window layer, and the glazing. Furthermore, all layers must fit exactly on top of each other to make sure that the tabs fit into the slots without resistance. Correcting a bad fit may be difficult. For the front facade I had to use clamps to press-fit the facade wall onto the tabs of the core structure.

The sequence for assembling the complete structure was 1) assemble and glue core structure, 2) glue front face onto core structure, 3) glue back facade onto core and 4) add remaining walls. The resulting structure is very robust and stable. Some work like adding the window sills can be done before or after assembly. I tend to mount them before because the windows are easier to access when walls are still separate.

Warehouse Sign

Some of the challenges I had with the corners of the Terminal Warehouse I was able to avoid this time. The prototype does have quoins imitated with painted white and natural red bricks on the east side. Additionally, the pier layer of the front facade allowed me to cover the seam resulting from the toothed construction. The large West Virginia Pulp & Paper sign under the roof on the eastern wall required some experimentation to get it right. I was determined to paint it on the wall just like the prototype, rather than using some decal.

I started by airbrushing white paint on the wall (1), then added the sign template laser cut on painters tape. To cut the template I had to stick the tape onto lazerboard. When cut, I transferred the still complete template onto the wall (2). Next, I then carefully removed the negative part of the sign between the letters with tweezers. The letters now covered the white paint. This allowed me to airbrush the space between the letters and the frame with the same Burnt Siena paint that I used for the bricks (3). I then removed the remaining tape that covered the letters. I still had to touch up the sign quite a bit as the process was not perfect. But then, the prototype was certainly not perfect either.

I haven’t added the signs on the front wall yet. To avoid the time-consuming and risky procedure, I will use decals. Failure to get the signs correctly painted onto the front facade would mean to redo the entire facade. I certainly want to avoid this.

Building the Fire Escape

The building has a beautiful fire escape on the back wall that is well visible from the High Line. The escape covers the entire building from the top sixth floor to the ground floor. On every floor, there’s a fire exit door and a small stairway landing area. While I like edged-metal fire escapes, they’re difficult to adjust to a specific situation. Also, they become quite expensive if used on a building of this size. Having created a simpler escape before that looked good, I decided using the on the laser cutter for this more complex task. Designing the stairs in Inkscape was the first obstacle though. Correctly measuring the staircase is relatively easy. But getting the design correct in the proper angles is a different story. It involved multiple attempts of test cuts and assemblies, then verification of the part on the building.

To facilitate assembly, I tried to combine two or even three stairs with landings into one piece. The railings and wall strings are separate pieces connected with tabs onto the stairs and landings. The material I used is 0.015″ lazerboard. The railing posts are are not more than 0.016″ thin, slightly wider than etched metal posts would be. While the individual pieces may be fragile, the glued and painted structure is quite strong due to its complex geometry. I gave the my fire escape a black coating and weathered it with rust paint. The prototype is rusty and must have painted a long time ago in a white or beige color. Nevertheless, the stairway still looks great and I’m happy having being able to add a very prototypical, non-trivial detail to the warehouse.

For now, the West Virginia Pulp & Paper warehouse is complete. Roof details will have to wait a bit as I’m anxious to build more structures from that block first.

Harris H. Uris Iron Works Buildings at 513 to 521 West 26th Street

HistoryThese buildings were erected between 1911 and 1921 during the height of West Chelsea’s second wave of industrial development. A that time, some of the manufacturing had already begun relocating to cheaper places outside of Manhattan. The easternmost building, No. 513, was completed in 1921 as a 3-story factory. The next building, at No. 515 was completed in 1911 as a 6-story factory. It has three main bays, with one wider main bay in the center and two narrower bays on either side. The corner piers extend beyond the main roof line as bulkheads. The third building, at No. 521, has 10 floors, and was completed in 1914 as a 9-story factory (all according to Wikimapia). It is two bays wide and has large rectangular windows.

While only No. 521 was designed by its original owner, Harris H. Uris, both No. 515 and 521 were used by the Harris H. Uris Iron Works company. The tax photos from 1939/1940 still show the building lettered accordingly. Most likely, though, the buildings were no longer used for heavy manufacturing. By then, Harris H. Uris had already moved into real estate development and many of these West Chelsea buildings were used as warehouses or for lighter industries, such as printing or clothing. The three units (plus No. 525 adjacent to 521) still exist today In their original size except that a renovation in 2009 replaced the windows and added penthouses on top of No. 515 and 521.

Compressed Design

To fit the complex between my highline and the backdrop, I had to compress the three buildings slightly. I absolutely wanted to retain overall character given by the stepped heights of the 3, 6, and 9 story unit, however. While I kept No. 513 pretty much at its prototypical size, I reduced the three bays of No. 515 to two. It includes the main bay on the left side and the narrower right bay. I retained the height of the building.

To keep the character of No. 521 unchanged, I kept the two bay structure but reduced the building’s width by about 25%. I was able to do this by reducing the number of horizontal sashes from 3 to 2 for both window bays My building has 9 stories (including a mezzanine between the first and second floor) and windows that are as close to the prototype as seen on the tax photos of 1939/1940.

Fortunately, I found an exact plan on the Internet in material presented to the NYC Landmark Protection Commission (LPC) in 2017 which helped me not only to get the right proportions but also the exact measures. As the last inch before the backdrop I’ll use for the ramp track down from the highland to the street-level track, I had to find a way to integrate the track into unit at No. 521. For now I left an opening which I can convert into a bridge or something. I might even be able to hide the ramp inside a pedestrian bridge.

Construction

The design and construction of the model was straightforward. I cut the front of the three units from one piece of 1/16″ MDF (the 9 stories were still okay for my Beamo). No. 513 has windows covering it for more than 80% of the surface, leaving very little space for the side walls. To obtain the three-dimensional fidelity of the front with the recessed spandrels between the windows and piers I used 0.017″ thick lazerboard with engraved brick pattern. This way, all the piers of the three buildings got an extra layer. So did the top floors and parapets of no. 515 and 521.

Fortunately, the floors of the three buildings seem to be on the same height. This simplified the internal bracing for which I constructed interlocked walls and floors. Every two stories there is a floor with a square hole in the center. The hole will allow me later to add lighting and to insert a diagonal black screen to stop the light from the back windows.

Windows and Doors

As the photos show, the entire structure has many windows. I cut them in 0.017″ lazerboard. I probably pushed the limits a bit too hard on the muntins which I designed only about 0.015″ (0.38 mm) wide on the laser cutter. They became very fragile on the windows on No. 521, mostly because the individual panes are relatively high. This results in a too wide grid that does not provide enough support to the very thin muntins.

The building does not have visible lintels on the front side but it has accentuated window sills. I used 0.02 and 0.04 thick lumber which I glued into the designated space at the bottom of the window openings. Building no. 515 has windows with wide mullions for which I used vertical 1/16″ MDF strips which I fit precisely into the front and the walls. Hidden tabs under the top layer of lazerboard where available (at the bottom and top) ensure a tight fit and provide stability. Some of the windows on the ground level have security grilles.

Windows on the East (no. 515) and West side (no. 521) as well as the ones on the back are very different from the front windows. I had to consult Google Street View to better understand shape and size, assuming they had not fundamentally changed. Most of them are rectangular with single hung 2-by-3 window panes. My building no. 521 has segmental arched windows with radiating brick lintels on the West side even though the original windows could have been simply rectangular. That side wall will not be visible on the layout, though, as that wall is against the backdrop.

Other Details

I did not have any archive material of the back side of the buildings. Google maps shows a window structure that is different from the front. Building no. 521 has a (fairly massive) fire sscape that is integrated on the rooftop with the base of the water tower. Since the West Virginia Pulp & Paper building is too close on my layout, there is no space for it and so I left it. Other details are hard to identify. For instance it’s not clear where the three buildings had loading docks. We can assume that the piers of no. 515 are elevator shafts but the right pier on tax photo 698/24 does appear to have an entrance on the ground level.

Other details that I have added to complete the buildings are:

• Building no. 515 has roof structures behind the bulkhead. I’m assuming these are for the roof access and for infrastructure components, including the water tower on no. 515.
• Building no. 521 likewise has a roof structure behind the bulkhead on the West side. That structure partially carries two massive two-story high water towers.
• Building no. 515 appears to have well visible quoins on the East side simulated with white painted bricks. I applied a 1/8″ wide strip of brick-textured lazerboard on both the corners of no. 515 and 521. They conveniently covered the ugly seam between the front and side walls as well as the edge of the front MDF sheet.
• Again, no. 515 has a Harris H. Uris Iron Works lettering on the parapet. Having compressed that building to 2 from 3 bays, I shortened it to Uris Iron Works. I cut the 1/8″ high letters from .017″ lazerboard.
• No. 515 has white or light gray metal shutters in the eastern wall similar to the ones on the Terminal Warehouse.

Wolff Annex Building at 508 West 26th Street

The Wolff Annex at 508 West 26th Street is a 12-story high building constructed in 1926 and 1927 for the printing business of the namesake company. It is also referred to as the annex building to the Wolff Bindery building at 518 West 26th Street which was built almost twenty years earlier. The building was one of the first structures in that area to use reinforced concrete. This allowed for fewer columns and overhead beams and for much larger windows (Source: West Chelsea Historic District, Designation Report p. 49). Its architectural height is 155 ft as per Wikimapia.

The lower nine floors of the building have the full size of the base. Floors 10 to 12 are recessed, the top twelfth floor a bit more than the tenth and eleventh floors. On this, the Designation Report notes (p. 50): “The setback of the annex building above the ninth story is a result of New York City’s 1916 Zoning Resolution, the first comprehensive zoning code in the country. The 1916 Zoning Resolution implemented height and setback controls that resulted in New York City’s signature “wedding cake” typology for high-rise construction.”

Unlike the neighboring R.C. Williams building (10th Avenue between West 26th and 25th Street) the Wolff Annex did not have a separate freight spur and did not use freight rail for a long time. Paper and printing supplies were delivered by truck to its loading docks on West 26th Street. It was only in the mid-1950s when the Wolff Book Manufacturing Co. purchased the R.C Williams Co. warehouse building that the company got access to the Westside Railroad. It is unclear to me (and sources don’t mention this) if the underpass driveway or garage at West 25th Street documented in this Photo (697/27) that still exists today was used for the delivery of printing materials.

Compression

On my layout configuration for the Tenth Ave/W27th Street module, the building towers above all other buildings. Consequently, there was no way I could reduce the height of it. However, I had to compress both the building’s width and depth to fit on the module. The Wolff Annex sits at the edge of my module 8 but is really on module 9 which includes the reverse loop. The track of the loop reduces the available width on West 26th Street even though I decided to let the loop track go through the building. That track enters it on the second floor on the east side cutting through the building diagonally to leave it on the south side.

Design of the Model

The compressed model includes the staircase tower on the east side plus three or the four wide window bays in the center. I also adopted the wedding cake-like setbacks of the floors above the ninth. I tried to stick with the appearance on the tax photos of 1939/1940:

• Building height: the 155 foot height translates to a full 30 cm
• Ground floor, front of the building: Two loading docks in the center and the main entrance on the left. The large windows seen today are a recent addition. Below the third bay there will be an opening large enough for the ramp track connecting the high line to the street level tracks.
• Ground floor, west and back side: Most of the ground floor walls are not directly visible. I decided the leave them windowless and leave the walls either as simple concrete.
• Second to eleventh floors: As the historical photos suggest and a close inspection confirms, the wall infills at the front are brick. Today the bricks are painted over. The ones on the east side and the back of the building are concrete infills. I used brick for the infills of the large window bays on the building front and back. Infills on the east side, the front staircase and the smaller windows at the back are concrete.
• Twelfth floor, front: The twelfth floor at the front follows the design of the floors below with large steel frame windows. The slanted glass front seen today replaced the originally vertical windows during a recent remodeling and is not relevant to the period I’m modeling.
• Balustrades: I repeated the cast concrete balustrade from the ninth floor on the eleventh floor even as there is no indicating for it. The available photos show a simpler nondescript railing on the eleventh floor.

The compressed structure represents about 75% of the original width and a similar factor for the depth.

Construction

I started with the front wall as this would give me a good idea of the final dimension and the overall appearance. The core of the wall is a 1/16″ laser cut MDF sheet (the sheet slightly exceeded the 300mm cutting width of my Beamo laser but I still managed to get the job done). I used one additional layer of .015″ thick lazerboard to emulate the projecting pilasters between the windows and two layers on the staircase section. For the steel frames of the windows I used a slightly thinner lazerboard. I glued the top lazerboard layers on the MDF before airbrushing them in a grey concrete tone.

I cut the window frames in large sections in order to have a very precise fit before also painting them with a darker grey. The gaps cut for the vertical braces helped to fit the windows exactly on the back of the finished walls. Once all was dry, I glued 1/64″ thick glazing from food containers to the back. This would give me a very stable composite structure made of five layers (outer and inner lazerboard, MDF core, window frames, and glazing). To finish the wall, I had to add separately applied and pre-painted window sills and brick spandrels.

A particular challenge for the building front was the staircase. Inferring from the angular wall with the doors, the staircase must have a trapezoidal shape with a door leading to an exterior open space on every floor. I was able to attach the front wall of the staircase as one piece to tabs on the floor sheets. That way, the doors to the closed staircase are well visible from the outside but the missing intermediate floors of the exterior space are not.

Internal Structure

Apart from the base plate and the roof, the building has a partial floor (ceiling) every second floor above the first, third, etc. to the eleventh floor. The center of the floor sheet is open and has a diagonal gap that is used to insert a full size vertical wall. When rotated in place, the vertical wall firmly interlocks with the floors, providing very stable internal bracing. In addition, the front and back walls are supported by three vertical brackets that stretch from the base to the roof. They have rounded tabs that snap with corresponding gaps in the external wall. Together with the floors, the brackets also separate the building into smaller partitions functioning as vision blockers and giving the illusion of rooms. The open space in the center of the building still gives me sufficient access to the floors when installing lighting later.

A Track Through the Building

The building has two openings for tracks, one on the east side for the reverse loop of the high line. A second on one west side is for the connecting track between the high line and the street level tracks. While the latter one is unproblematic, the one on the east side is more challenging. The reverse loop enters the building on the east side and leaves it on the south (back) side. The curve has a 13″ radius causes quite a bit of overhang for instance with the passenger cars. I had to do some testing with the walls in place to figure out if my design worked. Based on this I had to extend the opening on the back side significantly.

Finally, with the structures that are well visible on that original photo from 1940, I’m now able to take my own photo of the modeled structures on my Westside Railroad project layout. Compare the photo of my compressed model below with the tax photo and the one from 2022, all taken from pretty much the same location and the same angle.