One thing that my HOn3 layout has been conspicuously missing is the massive wooden snowshed atop 10,246-foot Lizard Head Pass (although the railroad gleefully advertised "10,500 feet"). My Lizard Head scene contains all the other elements, including the structures and snow fences (and even Lizard Head Peak itself transported to the opposite side of the track because Rule #1). But the lack of snow shed makes it look like some other freelanced scene:
The real snowshed covered an entire turning wye and once extended well past the section house (until a 1939 fire cut it back). It included a covered passing siding as well. Thankfully I didn't model the wye and I can save myself hundreds of dollars in stripwood and who knows hoe many hours.
I thought about making a styrene box and sheathing the outside. I thought about a lot of ways to avoid the work of building it stick by stick like the real thing. But I got to thinking about how it would look from a flatcar cube cam...and concluded the
only way to do it is stick by stick, just like the prototype. That way, little shafts of light will filter in just like the real thing.
So, with hundreds of photos and the advice of other modelers who have tackled the shed, I started drawing my plan.
The shed will end up some 26 inches long or so. The double-track end will be 32 scale feet wide (one scale foot wider on each side than the prototype) and the walls 22' high (2 scale feet higher than the prototype, minus one foot for the sills sitting below grade). The posts are 1/8" dowel (roughly 12" diameter in HO) and the sills and rafters 12 x 12. The siding is 2 x 12 x 16. There will be 2 x 6 sway braces and 6 x 6 stringer rafters. When I get to the roof, there are a few cantilevered sections known as "strongbacks" that help keep the walls together where the roof is really wide but there's not enough clearance between the tracks for the center wall.
As of tonight, I have the framing for a 72-foot section of one outer wall and a center wall. The two 12 x 12 rafters are resting in place so they're not perfectly aligned.
Wish me luck. I'm waiting on what I fear is only the
first shipment of 2 x 12 and 2 x 6 from Canada...
