OUTHOUSES AND WOODSHEDS

Continuing my construction of structures for the company "villages" located at stations up the hill on the Cascade Line, my attention turned to the small auxiliary structures supporting the main structures of the "village.  Most of the housing had a woodshed--a good fuel choice for these remote sites.  Wood for heating and cooking would be plentiful in the Cascades, especially given the 1926-27 construction date for these structures.  

Station plats and photos show a wood shed for each of the operator houses, the four-family bunk house for the section gang, and the section foreman and signal maintainer's houses at most stations.  A couple of sites, notably Wicopee and McCredie Springs, do not have wood sheds for the section foreman's house or signal maintainer's house (Wicopee). Instead these houses were built on a hill slope that provided room for the woodshed within the skirting underneath these houses.  I will build these structures, including the extended skirts at a later time.  For now, I needed thirteen woodsheds for the housing at Cascade Summit (7) and Cruzatte (6--no signal maintainer house).

ALW Lines kit SP 13 covers the standard wood shed.  http://alwlines.com/?cat=2  My kits included a mix of old and new, with the older kits using peel-and-stick shingle strips and the newer kits using laser-cut plastic shingle sheets.  I much prefer the newer shingle sheets, but the older shingle strips work fine and provided a good place to use shingle-strip ends saved from the four-family bunkhouse project.

Woodsheds getting laser-cut shingle sheet roofing applied.  

My other small structure project built four four-hole outhouses for the section gangs.  ALW Lines kit SP 11 covers this structure.  Both the wood shed and outhouse are simple builds with four walls, a floor, two roof pieces and appropriate trim.  With its four doors and board-and-batten siding, the outhouse trim is a bit more involved, but the peel-and-stick trim makes the job easy.  My basic construction technique for these closed structures has me assembling a pair of walls with an interior corner post.  Two of these sets are then joined on top of the floor, with the roof pieces following after the glue sets on the wall-floor assembly.

Outhouse wall assembly.

Completed outhouses and woodsheds.

Section gang structure cluster at Cascade Summit.

The developing village at Cruzatte.

Although small, these structures are needed to complete their station scenes.  In all cases, I needed these structures to guide terrain forming.  Each of the station villages along the Cascade Line above Oakridge were built on hillsides that came down to track level.  In most cases, this means the wood sheds and outhouses are behind and slightly uphill from their respective houses.  I am close to completing my first full station sets of structures for the company villages.  This will allow me to form the base terrain behind these villages--an important goal for this overall project.