Trolley Barn ~ Thursday, December 29, 2022

Any trolley layout needs a barn. A small layout calls for a small barn--mine has room for one car, though it's "future-proofed" for any future slightly larger layout, and can potentially hold two. For now the extra space can be for maintenance equipment, or maybe the transit company has a bus or two too.

I don't think there's any of-the-shelf small trolley barn kits in N Scale, but there's a plenty of kitbashable industrial building kits, like this venerable one:

It was longer than I needed, but vertically speaking, too short. So I cut and glued walls to suit what I needed.

And windows.

The roof clerestory of this kit just has vents, but I rounede=d up extra plastic window frames and improved the interior lighting a bit:

Here it is assembled. Some Squadron putty helped fill gaps left over from my cutting and gluing.

For brick structures, like to first spray primer, but then apply craft paint by brush. The window glazing is Micro Kristal Clear, which works nicely for the larger multi-pane industrial windows.

You can't quite see it in the pictures, but it's open at both ends. That might or might not be prototypical (I'm sure there's at least a few examples somewhere), but it's useful if I park a trolley in there and it doesn't quite feel like moving again without an encouraging tap! This makes the interior semi-visible--it's not detailed, but I painted it brown. This was another reason to use Kristal Clear for glazing--when you get a peek at the inside, it blends in better than a clear sheet of plastic would.