As mentioned in my previous post, I’m currently focused on building around the main country station and the road and level crossing area next to it. The station is based on the Yorkshire pattern which is seen on lines such as the North York Moors and the Settle to Carlisle.

The main station models – the buildings, platform shelter, bridge and signal box are resin models from the Hornby Skaledale range which is based in the same area. In the last post I was focused on re-painting the station buildings to match the area colour scheme and the bridge.

Having been to the Settle to Carlisle line last year and seen the actual buildings in situ one thing that really struck me was how pretty much every station on the line had the same Station Master’s house alongside the main station. Sadly Hornby has not reproduced this as part of their range so I had to look further afield.

Thankfully I’m modelling an area of the world that is very well known, and as such other manufacturers have also modelled the same station buildings, and I was able to find a Station Master’s house in the range from Metcalfe models.

I’ve not built one of the Metcalfe carboard models before, however I have built a few of the Scalescenes ones, so was interested to see how they compared. The large difference is that where the Scalescenes models come as a PDF which you need to print and mount, the Metcalfe model comes as a pre-printed and cut set of parts which mostly just need assembly.

Overall I was impressed with the model, however in a few places I did think the instructions could have been clearer. For example one of the windows is fractionally larger than one of the other station sizes, however there is no indication of which of the windows in the model this actually was.

There are also a few key differences between the Hornby and the Metcalfe models – mainly because I think they are based on different stations in Yorkshire. Small details such as the colour of the window surrounds I was able to deal with by painting them in the same red as I’ve just painted the Hornby models. The main challenge is around the roof ridges and facias which was quite different, so in the end I printed additional roof ridges from the Scalescenes models (the beauty of them being a PDF) and used them in place of the Metcalfe ones.

So some photos of the final model ready to go on the layout…