by Bruce Mohn/photos by the author
Some time ago, my friend Michael Rahilly purchased a bunch of laser-cut kits for his planned O scale layout. That never came to be for a variety of reasons and we ended up selling off most of the kits at swap meets.
We could not sell one kit, a Blair Line LLC company house. I pulled it out, looked over the pieces, and found that it said “station” to me rather than company house. I’m sure there’s no reason it couldn’t be a company house, but we all see things in different ways. It measures 23’ long by 16’ wide in O scale.
I found the large laser-cut pieces fit well, but they tended to be flimsy. As a result, I broke the walls any number of times while fitting doors and windows. I’m not a fan of peel-and-stick windows and doors, so those were replaced from the start with Grandt Line styrene parts. That required some cutting and fitting, and cussing and filing, to match these up with the openings.
To become a station, I really thought it needed a bay window for ticket sales. Because adding this would stick out onto the platform, the platform needed to be moved out slightly. The latter was accomplished easily, just a matter of cutting and gluing, adding new roof columns and new platform supports. The bay window itself was a bit more involved. I’m not sure that Grandt Line ever made castings for a bay window. Simpson did, but I didn’t discover that until long after this project was completed.
For my building, I used a similar procedure for kitbashing a bay window I’d made for a UTCo passenger station. That involved cutting down two window castings to make the side windows. I used an unmodified eight-glass window (GL No. 3702) for the front. I cut two other windows down to four-glass windows, trimming off the unneeded mullions, and gluing the remaining mullion onto the other side. Sounds easy, but in practice it involved careful cutting and trimming, sanding and gluing, and more cussing…