“Ein Feste Burg…” or a little strong tower
Jim Trotman has built many cottages for his Saxony layout. Will the same techniques work for a taller building?
One afternoon, a friend was watching my trains run around the rockery and coming into and out of my growing village of 1:20 scale houses. He suggested that a castle would fit nicely into the rockery and complement the village.
As I run Saxon and DR trains, the houses are based on ones in the Saxony area of Germany. The tower shows a bit more ‘artistic license’ as its inspiration came from the towers on the town walls at Rothenburg on the river Tauber many miles south and west of Saxony. The roofline is more typical of central and northern Germany, but the timber-framed extension and the shutters on my tower are very much based on those at Rothenburg. The real towers are seven and eight stories high, but four plus a roof appeared right for my railway.
Starting with a 12mm marine ply base, the walls are all made out of 9mm MDF, glued and pinned. The structure stands a grand total of 700mm high, over two feet tall in old money.
As the MDF is quite thin and soft, I predrill the holes for the panel pins. Once the white glue is dry, the whole thing is very sturdy, if a bit heavy. The tower is certainly heavier than the houses that I build, so I added four offcuts from fence posts in the base to give it extra stability, the weather in Cumbria not always being still and sunny.
There was to be a gate through a remnant of a town wall beside the tower but it did not look right in its original location closer to the station, so I decided to make it into a standalone tower, adding another gable end to the former gateway section. This was done by just adding more MDF walls.
Over the years, as I built my layout ‘Waldheim’ (Garden Rail November 2021), I’ve developed methods that seem to work well. Once the MDF carcass is built, the structure is given a couple of coats of masonry sandstone paint and thin strips of plastic sheet are added to provide stone edging to the rendered areas and the stone structure. These are painted before the 1:12 scale dolls house adhesive stone was added.
The windows are made from very thin
black plastic with thicker surrounds painted to represent stone mullions. Thin strips of white plastic make up the window frames, painted, and then varnished. The shutters are also thicker plastic sheet, but I discovered that sections cut from Q Tips make perfect hinges for the shutters. Although rather bright, the red and white paint on the shutters is a direct copy from one of the real towers at Rothenburg.
The roof sections were made from POLA spare parts and the gutters also came from POLA, although 6mm plastic tube had to be added for the longer downpipes. The roof tiles were given about three coats of acrylic paint in various shades of terracotta, orange and brown. A small wood stack and chopping block were added, the block coming from a liquor bottle top, and the logs from twigs off the oak tree in the garden.
Once completed, the whole structure was given a couple of coats of sprayed acrylic satin varnish. I do not leave the structures out in the weather, but a layer of protection is always useful just in case of showers.
The whole thing cost me about £30 as the MDF and plywood were free as leftovers from other jobs. Even if the wood had to be bought, the tower would have only cost about £50 which is considerably less than G scale plastic kits. This tower is unique and provided about three weeks of enjoyment from first ideas to completion, but it’s back to cottages next.