Building the Roundhouse and Shops, Part 2

With the painting finished I next built the interior framing.  I wanted it to have more detail than just a standard barn frame so I designed wood trusses supported by 12" x 12" posts.  Doing this the posts are only need at the walls and not in the center of the room which helps to keep things open for more machinery.

Once I completed the interior framing for the shop I decided to also do the framing for the roundhouse so I designed new trusses for that.  There will still be interior posts because the space is much larger but the trusses add some real visual appeal.  Before I built the roundhouse interior framing I mocked up all the walls and discovered an anomaly.  Because the room is so small I had to move the roundhouse 13" closer to the turntable which then required spreading out the rear wall to accommodate the wider angle between tracks.  Using the rear wall sections from the kit would leave a 1" gap on either end of the rear wall.

This is where things really snowballed.  I decided to make my own rear wall sections using parts of the side walls.  The nice part of this is that the windows would be much larger allowing a better view inside and more light for the crew.  I "cut and pasted" wall castings to properly fit behind the frame posts.  Note that in the original kit it was suggested to place posts at each wall section came together to hide the joints.  I've continued this and it works well with the design.  Using the side wall castings across the back actually made more sense to because then all the windows would be the same size.  I had also noticed that the original rear walls had smaller stones, probably originating from a different kit.  The final look with the larger windows more closely resembles old factory photos I've seen.

For the roundhouse framing I made up a full size drawing (1/4" = 1") that I could build the five identical frames from.  These were more complex than the shop frames because of the skylight housing and the sloping rear roof.  When finished I added NBW (nut, bolt, washer) castings to all the frames.