Wrâldsein - an inbetweenie of some sort

Let's start this post with some marginal history: In the late 1800s, the Dutch government decided on building five types of generic train station buildings all over the country. They were divided into classes, in which 1 was the largest and 5 the smallest. And although they were standardized, they all still had their own special features and shapes.

A classic example of a Waterstaat class 5 station: Kapelle-Biezelinge. photo: Wikimedia Commons

Waterstaat klasse 5 stations were small, had a central two or three floor building and two small wings. Some had an added single floor building on the left side and some also one on the right. Most of them are either demolished or rigorously changed. There are only a few originals left. I really think they look very pretty. I'd love to live in one.

I found a small model of it online and ordered it. I scanned it and reduced it to 50% of its original size. I wanted to build a generic one, not an existing station but something imaginary out of a time long ago.

After the jump, you'll find the build, a PK's blog exclusive!

I wanted to make it fictitious, A station of a place that doesn’t exist. Now people sometimes say of the two northernmost provinces of the Netherlands that it looks like one has reached the end of the world. behind the last dyke, the low lands almost seamlessly transform into tidal marshes and vanishes into the hazy distance in which you can see, on a clear day, the North Sea or one of the islands.
So what would be more appropriate than to let this train journey end somewhere fictitious at the "end of the world"? What shall we call it then? In my regional speak there’s no single word for such a thing that could pass for a small village’s name but in Friesland, the province next to where I live they have a fabulous language (no dialect) that could be compared to what Gaelic is in the UK. I got the word from there.
Wrâldsein*. World’s end. A village that doesn't exist but sounds faraway, desolate and isolated. Let's go there.

The model was bought at the interwebs via a foundation that supports Native Americans from the Dakota tribe. The kit itself is very straightforward. Walls, roofs, chimneys, no details. I had collected lots of photos of the type of building in all its variations and started to detail it. I scanned the sheets and ran them through Photoshop for separating parts, doubling parts and creating two extra sheets of details. Oh yeah: the kit itself was designed in H0 scale, to be printed on A4 sheets of paper but I reduced it 50% in size, having two pages on one A4. So, 1/87 became ehrmmm.. euh... errrr... smaller. That's it.

The main building has a very distinctive shape because the inner part of the façade is set back a little. It has a decorative arc on top and a window sill on the first floor that stands out a lot. These shapes were only visible in line art on the original model but I made them 3D.
The doors and windows also were cut out and replaced by copies behind the original façade to give the walls more body and depth. The arcs over the windows and the window sills were also added.

I made the 'zinc' roofs from grey 270 grams paper in which I used a needle to make the corrugated  lines. Underneath it originally was wood, so I used white paper for the bottom. I also added the protruding roof beams, which I made from mat paper.

The eaves on these buildings varied from station to station. Some had very kitschy ornamental ones, some had plain straight and small, which I liked the most, so I made those. Edge gluing to the roof was easy because of the two layers of thick paper.

I added some rain pipes made from aluminium tubes and added them to every corner of the main building.

The side wings were added and there it was: the fictitious train station of Wrâldsein. But it was too big. First I thought of a kind of cut-off diorama setting in which I could incorporate a part of the train but you would not get a sense of its desolate surroundings so you could see the station wasn't even anywhere near a village. This station simply was too big to make this diorama. So I did another one. In 1/400.

I finished the station within a day. Even in this size it still was nice to make and caused no troubles in fitting. This one was placed on a railroad platform and I prepared a large frame for the diorama. 

It got a very tiny train that used to ride the unelectrified tracks in the 1950's to the 1980's which I always liked a lot. (I modified a free model I found somewhere online. I tried to trace it back but I couldn't find it... Anyway, it is not 100% accurate, I admit, but who cares?) I also had to construct a paper railroad track with sleepers, rails and a buffer block, it was the end of the world, remember? So the railroad probably would have ended there.

The diorama was made from scenery stuff, like grass granulate and very fine brown sand for ballast. The road was painted grey with acrylic. All in all a kind-of inbetweenie. A fun build.
So here's Wrâldsein. It doesn't exist but I'd sure like to live there.
Thanks for stopping by. 
And now it's back to the Falcon 9!
--PK


* How to pronounce Wrâldsein: It might sound a bit like "Rolled sign". But then again, it might not.