Hoofdstation Groningen 1/487 (or almost)

Hello people. Here I am again.

There was a lot of other stuff going on which kept me from posting and building regularly. But I did keep on building.

First, the Shuttle stack is momentarily on the back burner, I found out that the SRB's were too large, and I needed to address that issue first before continuing. I have to resize all components and I also want to detail a little more. But I will resume. I don't like unfinished projects. This is what I was working on the last few weeks.

A couple of weeks back, the train station (called “Hoofdstation”) in my city was elected most beautiful station in the Netherlands. And of course that is true. 

(If only that cursed atrocity of a “stadsbalkon”, which lies in front of the building, could be demolished and be replaced with something that shows a little more respect to the old neo-gothic building.)

To celebrate the election of the Hoofdstation, the Groninger Archives temporarily re-issued the big paper model of the station building of which they had a copy in their collection. They digitally scanned it and put it online in the original scale. It is a nice, hand-drawn, but rather tough model of the building. The build report follows below.

I happen to have this model for real, twice, even. But I decided to keep them intact and do the downloaded version. I revived the faded colours a little and paired the 6 sheets neatly to three A-3 sized templates.

The original 1/200 size model in its cover. 250 x 700 mm. the ruler shown is 50 cm / 500 mm.

A nice hand-drawn model. Very accurate and delicately coloured with watercolours.

Even more so, because I decided to do this one not in its intended scale (you could print two sheets on a 50x70cm sheet to keep the original size). I chose to do this on A4 sheets. And thusly it became rather small. The original building is about 122 meters long. The original model is 1/200. Mine turned out to be 1/487 , let alone a millimeter or two. 

I hoped I had the paper thickness taken in account enough to keep nice and clean lines. Mostly it did. I used 160 gpm2 paper, which is my standard to-go weight nowadays. In the build process I realised more than once that it was hand-drawn and it had a lot of badly fitting parts. More than once, I had to solve it by cutting parts apart and / or redesigning stuff.

Koos, a colleague of mine at work, also did this model but in the original 1/200 scale. It suffered enormously from UV light, it has become almost completely discoloured. But it was a good lead for me to help me through the smaller version I made.

My version, a tad smaller, would end up 250 mm wide.

The central part of the station with the entrance doors.

And its porch-like canopy.

Both wings have a gallery with small benches. One of them now houses a burger restaurant.

Tiny stuff. Dormers, small towers, bay windows, all were edge glued.

West wing. Just a mirror of the east wing. So it will be just as easy, right?

I tried an easier way of getting the roof parts together. This would probably work...

The biggest problem was in the roof construction. It has a couple of flattened hip-roofs, (I guess they're called that, please correct me if I'm wrong) with some of extensions and dormers. These dormers weren't hard at all. But the roof and (perhaps) the thickness of the paper still caused some differences in positioning the parts. In the end, it caused twisting and misshaping more than once and I ended up with a wickedly twisted roof. Really frustrating. So it was time it felt the wrath of my fist.

Thud.

In the end it was solved by cutting pieces in another way, making smaller more manageable parts. This worked. Still some malforming but hardly noticeable with all other things going on like towers, dormers and chimneys. The other challenge was the overall span at the back where the railroad tracks are. This appeared to be quite easy though.

Cutting this smaller wall part loose from the lower roof section made it easier in the end.

Yes. There tsill is some twistiness in the lower roof but well, it is not that obvious.

So, here it is.

Next project will be either finishing the N1 fairing of the redesigning of the Shuttle SRB's.

Until then,

--PK