After completing the substation I started in on the actual power plant. For this project I am using the Northern Light & Power from Walther’s. The structure itself is pretty basic, base plate, four walls and a roof. The large windows scream for a detailed interior or so I thought, more on this later. I also got the interior detail kit for the power station. This is pretty basic also, two steam turbines, two generators and walls for the boiler section.

I started by assembling the four walls and then masked off the raised lip that the windows mount to as I wanted a clean surface to glue the windows to. I then masked the whole exterior to protect it from overspray and then sprayed it with a rattle can, in a light industrial gray.

After removing the masking tape I set the building onto it’s base but could not get it to sit flat. After carefully looking at it I found that there was a production error in the tooling. The cutout and “stoop” for the service door is on the right side of the base while the actual door is on the left side. While not a major problem it is a little annoying. I made a cutout on the left side for the door and removed the stoop from the right side ( and later removed the stoop for the roll up door as well ) and the building dropped right into place. I’m sure Walther’s felt it wasn’t worth the expense of retooling the molds for such a minor thing but you would expect some kind off additional mention that the problem would have to be addressed while assembling the kit.

Next up was to fill in the mortar lines in between the bricks. I have never had very good luck using the usual methods – some variation of flowing a diluted paint into the mortar lines and then wiping off the excess – and started just painting on a concrete color and then dragging the edge of a razor blade across the face of the bricks to remove the paint. I have found the trick to this is letting the paint just set up ( just about dry to the touch ) and the removing it. The added benefit is it roughens up the brick face and tones down the plastic sheen.

When I had completed a side doing this I would celebrate by painting all of the concrete surfaces ( base, window sills and architectural details ) until the whole structure was done.

Before:

After:

After the exterior was done I turned my attention to the interior. After pulling up several pictures on the internet, I decided on steam lines, conduits for electrical wiring, some catwalks, control boxes and other miscellaneous details. As I said, with the big windows you needed a lot of detail. After gluing the Walther’s detail set in place ( painted it first ), I set the wall section back in place and taped a couple of the windows in place to get a feel for placement of the afore mentioned details. That’s when I noticed that the window mullions block about 50% of the interior. Even lit, you don’t need anywhere near the amount of detail as you think you would. Unless of course you into that kind of thing and need to be totally accurate.

So I settled on adding just the steam lines to the turbines and a catwalk over the turbines to access the steam valves. I will also add some figures and 55 gallon drums of lubricant. I don’t think that you would notice much more, especially at the angle that the power plant will seen at.

A side note, the heavy doors between the boiler section and the power plant are molded as wooden sliding doors. I painted them as steel doors, as I believe that they are meant as fire doors and would not be made out of wood.

Once that was done I applied the decals. This is another thing that bugs me about the newer Walther’s kits. On the older kits the used a thin decal that if you were not careful on long / large decal they would break and you would have to carefully line them up. The plus side was, with a little Solva Set, you could get them to snug around details like the brick work. They fixed the problem of the decals breaking by going to a very thick decal that no matter how much decal setting solution you use, you are not going to get them to settle into the detail work.

I also added a spacer plate to the substation to fill in between the substation and the power plant. Right now you can see the seam, but after ground cover is applied it will disappear. I did start to play with weathering to see if I could tone down the decal lettering and will finish the weathering before installing on the layout. Additionally the fencing and wiring of the substation will happen after it installed on the layout.

Well I think that is all for now. Until next time…

Happy railroading.

 

 

 

 

 

First up is the build of the Walther’s Power plant and power substation (walthers.com) that I received for Christmas. I know that I said that I would do a ” review ” of the kits, but this is more of how I did it and my impression of the kits and problems/faults of the kits.

I started with the substation. The kit is pretty straight forward in its build. For as simple as it is, it does have a tremendous visual impact. I started by identifying how it would go together and need to be painted. The only real problem in painting it is that the transformer could not be painted as a whole, I like to assemble things as much as possible. This makes glueing and seam clean up a lot easier, which then results in a better finished product. Most of it can be put together and then painted, but the cooling fins on the transformer ( at least what I assume are cooling fins, I probably didn’t do enough research on transformers to know for sure ) are to closely spaced to attach before painting. So I assembled them as sub-assemblies. I then mounted them to painting sticks, which are nothing more then a couple of 1X3’s and 1X4’s with double sided foam mounting tape grouped by color.

I first primed all of the pieces and then let them dry for as least 24 hours to let the paint completely dry and harden. I then painted the different parts in their respective colors. For small detail parts such as the insulators, I brushed painted after the base color had dried.

The base was spray painted a flat tan color, so that when I put ground cover on it, if there were any thin spots it would just look like dirt. Ah yes the base, this is my first “problem” with the kit. One has to decide how the substation will be used. The box art shows the substation sitting along side the power plant and I assumed that it could be used this way. Turns out there are two different types of substations. Probably an over simplification. There is an up converting substation and a down converting substation. The kit as a whole is a down converting substation, the type you would find in a residential or light industrial setting. Power is sent through power lines at around 300,000 volts. A little high for your home. Electricity comes in off from the high tension lines and is dropped to something a little more friendly for your house.

An up converting substation would be part off the power plant and would do the opposite. You only use about 2/3 off the base ( there is a cut line on the back side of the base where to cut it ).The instructions say that you can use it for this purpose with “some added detail”, but there is nothing noted as to what that detail is. I looked online, but as of yet to find a good explanation or picture of such an installation. I possibly have not used the right key words, but it has been a pain in the you know where.

My second problem with the instructions is that they don’t show how it would be wired up. There is some hint as to how it is done, but they are incomplete. Meaning that they show some of the wiring but not all of it. Plus the instructions kind off look like a copy of a copy of a copy. There are a few substations within driving distance and I will have to head out to get a few photos of one so that I know what I’m doing. But I picture myself out there with my camera with a telephoto lens ( as you can’t get really close to one ) and have Homeland Security show up wondering why the sudden interest in the local power infrastructure.

Anyway, I got everything painted and assembled but did not permanently mounted it to the base. Also I did not put the fence in place as this will all be done when I put the piece in place and get the ground cover on first.

Below is a picture of the “completed” substation.

Next the power station.

Until then, Happy Railroading.