Station Update

A quick post on progress on the new station.First, as you can see above, I've painted the benches yellow (the popular answer from the comments a post or so back! Thanks everyone for your ideas!) and I'm really pleased with how they turned out!  I like the color/contrast of the yellow, and they give a nice 'cheeriness' the the platforms that wouldn't be out of place at a real station.

I've been busy working out the inter-connection of the station platforms with the new, ground level station building...which is about two stories above the platform tracks.   The idea, which is a common motif with many passenger stations in Europe, Japan and elsewhere, is that the platforms will be surrounded by lots of retail shops.  Given the distance between the platform level and the ground level, this means that the station is practically three floors, with two of those floors below the surface.

If any of that makes any sense at all.  The big dependency for how all this would work was going to be the stairs.  I finally recovered some stairs that were no longer needed from my Kato Overhead Station (story here) which would work perfect for the descent from the station to to the trains.

The problem is that they are quite long, and if I added them in the way they are now, the stairs would land you out on a platform itself!  Well, that won't work.

So I decided to split the stairs, having a landing with retail between the platforms and the ground level.

This also required me to carefully rip (cut lengthwise) the acrylic sheet with the decals, and transparent sheet applied - Yikes!  A lot of scoring of the acrylic and it came apart nicely.  Whew!

The stairs are in the process of drying after getting a coat of paint, and now that I have all the pieces to start figuring out where things will go, I'm hoping to make more progress on this station - and start to move the trains in!