model railroad fabbing: a depot in Arizona

For many years I have wanted to make a 1/87-model (h0-scale) of the depot of Kingman, Arizona, the way it looked in the 60's. I went there to make photos. The depot is boarded up now, waiting for renovation.

I tried to jigsaw the profiled edges out of styrene, but never got it nice symmetric. A laser cutter could do that a lot better.

But then you need a vector drawing and I am a novice on CAD-type programs like Photoshop, CorelDraw or Sketchup.

The learning curve proved pretty steep, as these apps can do far too much for the simple thing I wanted: eight walls with window-holes for a building.

I found, deeply buried in Photoshop, a function to unskew my photo's [select all - transform - distort]. And a contouring function to get the outline of the walls [filter - stylize - find edges]. But the result was not a clear contour.

I was advised to try CorelDraw. But I could not 'open' my unskewed photos, they had to be 'imported'. Those things ......

Looking back, the bottom line is clear: a one-day introduction workshop in an application would have saved a lot of energy.

In CorelDraw it proved quite easy to draw the contours with the pen-tool, the shape-tool and the 3-point-curve-tool.

Drawing is lighter if you replace the photo-image by its wireframe [under View]. When later removed the wireframe, I ended up with the contours.
But strange: when I printed them on paper nothing was visible. Because the pen was set to 'hairline', as required for the laser cutter. When set to .6 mm the outline was there
I wanted the printout to get the proper scale on the laser cutter by experimenting with the printing percentage. Did not work out as my photo's all had a different scale.
Then I found out that I could get the required scale in CorelDraw directly [arrange - transformation - size]. At that pane there is also a mirror-function, that can save half the work if you want something symmetric.

Having it set back to hairline I printed the file to the lasercutter. After some experimenting with the settings - styrene is rather soft - my walls were cleanly cut.

I now have to think in what way I can give volume and detail to resemble stucco walls. I could cut some detail-layers and glue them on.

But - and that is the nice thing about FabLab - I could also take a thicker material and then use the Modela to bring out the details. Don't know yet.

In the cut-out holes for the windows I will mount ready-made Tichy windows as the panes are too fine to laser them yourself.

Here you see the first version of the building.

Normally I would have been satisfied, because this would have cost me a couple of evenings sawing and filing.
Not now, then all of a sudden I have a prototype. And a drawing!

I can now adapt the form of the building to the space available on the model-railroad and also to the composition of the scenery, while preserving the atmosphere of the original

And then just lasercut it again at the lab.

What a luxury!