The Depot at San Juan Capistrano in the 1940's

 My actual model of the Santa Fe depot in San Juan Capistrano is like it looked in 1962 with the orginial lettering when it was built in 1894.

I had built this depot for a contest and just for fun because I liked the mission style architecture.
When I decided to model the Surf Line it was clear that San Juan Capistrano would be one of my signature towns on the layout and as I already had a model of the depot and freight house, this would make it even easier....I believed.

 When I decided to set the era in the 1940's and while studying photographs of that period, it became obvious that I could not put the shining white depot on the layout. The original depot was covered with vines and ivy leaves all over the bell tower and large parts of the roof.
Building the bell tower with the dome and the small ornaments all around was quite a challenge and so I did not want to cover all this work with foliage.

When I build the first Capistrano depot I already had the main structure lasercut, so I decided to make another run and build a new depot. This time saving me the hassle of building the bell tower and dome. Above are the main walls and collonade cut from 2.5 mm MDF.

Assembling the main structure was as easy as building a commercial kit. I provided tabs and slots, so  putting the walls together was a snap. 2.5 mm is not thick enough for the brick walls so I doubled the walls for the collonade. I used clamps to hold the pieces together until the glue dried.

Here is the basic structure. I need to cover the tabs and slots with some kind of compound to get a smoother finish. The bell tower will be covered with foliage so I don't spend too much time on hiding the tabs there.

To get the slopes of the roof correct I used the templates from the vintage HSM (Historical Scale Miniatures) kit.

The doors and windows had a protruding brick trim. I recreated that using 3 different sizes of strip wood.

Stay tuned for the next progress of the depot soon.