I am pretty new to O gauge railway modelling, or modelling at any gauge for that matter. When I retired I decided to fulfil a lifetime ambition of building my own layout. Forget N gauge or even OO, with my eyesight and level of coordination, it had to be at least O gauge for me to be able to handle it.

My layout will be based on the sleepy, forgotten Welsh border town known as Aberenglyn. It doesn’t exist of course, neither in the real world or yet in model form because I haven’t started to lay down the base board yet. For the time being I have been concentrating on constructing some of the buildings in the town, so that when I lay down the rails there will be something to go alongside them from day one. For me, anyway, it is all about the modelling; running trains is an entirely secondary bonus.

Aberenglyn will be a small rural market town but with a few industries appropriate to its remote rural setting. These are likely to include lime kilns, a timber yard and sawmill, and breweries. I decided to start with a type of building the architectural form of which I find particularly appealing and unusual – a maltings. Historically, malting buildings, though varied in form and size, have a number of things in common that relate to the process of malting grain, a process by which some of the starch in grain is converted to sugars. There are disproportionately large areas for storage and cleaning of the incoming grain, usually on an upper, well ventilated floor from which the grain could be fed by gravity to the next process, steeping.

Steeping was carried out in large tanks or troughs where the grain was soaked and allowed to germinate. It was then spread out to dry, so again, a disproportionately large floor area was needed for this part of the process. Once germinated to a satisfactory degree, the grain was kilned on a drying floor to stop germination and reduce the moisture content to a level for safe storage. Then, after cleaning to remove the rootlets that form during germination, the malted grain was stored at the maltings for a few weeks before delivery to the brewery.

The processes described above dictate the functionality of the building and therefore certain architectural characteristics that are very distinctive; long, low (two or three storey) buildings with floors of restricted height; louvered or slatted windows on the storage floors for ventilation; hoists and hoist canopies for lifting the incoming grain to the storage level, and most characteristic of all, the tall, pyramidal kiln roofs with open ventilation similar to oast houses. The kilns often had strong wrought iron braces at the corners and rows of wall ties for additional support. There is an excellent report prepared on behalf of English Heritage which describes the process in detail and discusses the historical development of the techniques and building design from the 18th through to the 20th century. It is a treasure trove of information for anyone interested in modelling one of these wonderful buildings.

My starting point was a trawl of the internet for architectural inspiration. The building that most took my fancy was Warwick and Richardson’s Brewery Maltings in Newark. I know, it’s a long way from the Welsh borders but I just liked it. By good fortune, the English Heritage report had a scale plan for the ground floor of this very structure. However, I quickly realised that it would be far too big for my purposes if I stuck rigidly to the prototype (it would have been 850mm long).

So I reduced the size of the building whilst still maintaining the basic layout and character. I also reduced it from three storeys to two. The finished building, is roughly 450mm long.

The first thing I did was to draw a ground plan for the building at 1:43 scale and I used this as a basis for planning out and drawing to scale all the elevations. My computer skills don’t yet extend to 2D CAD, so these were done by hand. I then used the elevations as templates to cut the basic structure from 5mm thick ‘Dura last’ foam board. The advantage of this material is that it is styrene faced and so can be solvent welded to other styrene modelling materials. It is also an excellent material to build with because you can cut away the inner face and foam filling to leave a tab of exterior face for welding to adjacent elevations, though some internal bracing in the form of a floor or stiffening the joint with styrene strip is advisable. It can be quite tricky to cut window and door apertures cleanly and accurately through the full thickness of the foamboard. One way round this is to accurately mark up the apertures on both sides and cut half way through from each. I used a sharp scalpel for straight cuts and a compass cutter for the curves.

I then cut identical elevations (making due allowance for the correct overlap to join the elevations together at the corners) from 1mm styrene sheet and welded these to the outer face of the model, before finishing off in Slater’s Plastikard ‘English bond’ brick sheet.

This has made an extremely robust model but, with the benefit of experience, I think I would omit the 1mm styrene sheet; with adequate bracing it is unnecessary. The roof is 1mm styrene (not foamboard) with Slater’s roofing laid on top.

The doors, windows, sills, gutters, downpipes kiln vents and staircase were all scratch built from styrene sheet, strip and tube. For the window frames, I made up wooden jigs to ensure accuracy and ease of construction; they were time consuming at first but once in the swing of it, not too difficult to make; see detail above right. The doors were cut from plain styrene sheet, grooved to replicate planking and then brushed with a hard wire brush to give an impression of grain. The hinges are thin styrene strip and rod, with thin slices of rod to model rivets. I opened out some of the joints along the bottom of the planks with a scalpel to give the effect of ageing and rot at the bottom of the doors (top left). For a more authentic feel I then added scratch built iron bracing at the kiln corners and a collection of details from Invertrain’s comprehensive catalogue; wall ties, fire buckets and a wall mounted crane.

The paint finish on the brickwork is particularly important to get a realistic and weathered look. I first sprayed the entire model with grey primer to bring everything together. Then I painted the brickwork in four stages.

I’m sure someone out there will tell me a better way of pointing brick Plastikard. The details were all painted with Humbrol enamels. Before placing the building on the layout the weathering of the details will need a bit of work but for now, I have put the model in the ‘finished’ box.