The Walthers N Modern Suburban Station

I've delayed working on Module 9 of my home T-Trak layout for nearly a year, mostly because I've been stumped by the Walthers N Modern Suburban Station kit. This is based on their Modern Gas Station, which in turn strikes me as more like a truck stop on a highway outside of town than a corner gas station, since it seems to have truck stop size rest room facilities, room for a fast food franchise inside, and lots of gas pumps. This in turn makes it a little hard to justify for a suburban rail station, since these typically have neither rest rooms nor fast food franchises.

I wound up swapping the front and rear walls, as on a truck stop, the more prominent facade faces the gas pumps, while on a suburban station, the more prominent facade faces the track. I think this is to make each stop more uniquely recognizable to the passengers, like the Chicago Metra station at Wheaton, IL. (This is a photo I took from a train through the green tinted window.) Doing this also puts the rest room windows out of sight in back.

I also decided to paint the roof using an old bottle of Floquil Jade Green paint. This isn't too far from the color that Virginia Railway Express uses on its newly built stations (as opposed to the ones it inherited from the Southern and the RF&P). Below is the newlty built VRE station at L'Enfant in southern Washington, DC, which has the same style roof as the Walthers kit.

I rejiggered the Wslthers plaform parts to extend the platform at the front and added Wheels of Time decals for the yellow non-skid strip that now appears on most platform edges, like the platform of the Van Nuys, CA station below:

I measured out the dimensions of the station platform base and added layers of thin Woodland Scenics foam to bring it up to a level that took it past the Peco switch machine and Kato catenary base that were near it. I also drilled a hole for a Just Plug stick on LED to go inside the building.

As with most of my recent modules, I installed Kato catenary bases that would allow me to add Kato catenary supports or leave them out depending on what I want to represent at the time. For instance, one of the prototypes I follow is Virginia Rail Express, which, although it is diesel and runs mostly on non-electrified right of way, does operate on formerly electrified track in southern Washington, DC that still has catenary supports in place. It also runs under active wire for a short distance in Washington Union Station.

But other prototypes I follow, like the Amrak Northeast Corridor and New Jersey Transit, are electrified, so I can have catenary supports in place or not as I choose.

The Walthers kit, despite its size, wound up being a challenge, but I was finally able to wrestle it into something like what I needed.