Recreating Minffordd Station

I was asked last week if I would write a bit more about how I went about scratch building the station building for Minffordd.

It was an intriguing design.  Many of the stations on the Cambrian, particularly those which were passing places, had reasonably substantial brick buildings with staff domestic accommodation attached, while halts usually had only the most basic shelters.

Minffordd was designed for considerable freight and 'human cargo' interchange, but it was also effectively a halt in the middle of a section.

The building was mostly wooden on a brick base.

And, more the point, when the last staff were withdrawn in the mid-1960s it was quickly taken down with little trace remaining, replaced with nothing more than a large bus shelter!

This made modelling it a challenge because I had nothing much more to go on to establish the dimensions than extrapolating from photographs, making assumption about the sizes of the windows and doors.

The other think I was able to do was take a good look at the Minffordd diorama in the museum at Gelert's Farm.

I had a stoke of luck when one of my FR contacts pointed me in the direction of some archive survey pictures of the station towards the end of its life, which crucially included one taken from the very camera-shy rear of the building.

This showed where a few of the details on the diorama model were incorrect, particularly around how the different parts of the building at the rear connected up.

Having sketched out a design the first step was to create a mock-up in cardboard to test fit on the layout and see if the dimensions seemed correct.

It seemed logic to build it as three sub-assemblies.  The main section at the front, with the open-fronted shelter area, and two extensions at the rear.

As is my way most of the build was done in styrene. 

Making the main walls, with their wooden battening, was made simple by using the Seam Roofing Sheet product in the Evergreen range, which you can get in various sizes of gap between the battens.

The slate roof was cut from the Wills sheets which have been around for years.  They are very thick and hard to cut, but it is worth the effort in my opinion because the moulded slates overlap property.

The sash window frames were fabricated from styrene strip, which is a time-consuming and delicate job, but worth it, I think, to get the depth.

I painted the building using acrylics to look very much like it was very near to being closed. 

The poster boards have had whatever was on the scraped off.

The final details, as you will see in the picture above, were to add working 'gas lamps' and attach the screen for the gents' lavatory on the left hand side, and the crinkly tin outbuilding.