Progress on my WW2 terrain board continues

My terrain board is going to be 4' by 4' with one 4 x 2 section being a railway marshalling yard and the other being a part bombed out city. My latest task has been assembling another cardstock building for the marshalling yard. This time it's a Coaling Stage from Metcalfe which cost me £7.25.

As usual the pack consists of sheets of pre-punched thick card plus instructions and accessories.

The instructions are easy to follow you just have to read them carefully and you'll be fine. The first task is to assemble the main walls and their inner supports as shown below.

Next you glue in the first floor and then the inner rear wall which locks things in place.

Add some interior details, the lower level coal heap and then the roof and its done.

This is a very simple building to construct and took very little time to build. However things weren't quite finished. There was the 'simple' matter of adding the external staircase. This was a nightmare to do. You have a series of cardboard tabs you have to glue together that build up into the treads for the staircase. These are then glued to to side wall being guided by a 'fomer'. Well I followed the instructions but my staircase ended up being too short. Luckily you get extra steps in case you lose any and adding these just about fixed things. But I had glue everywhere, things didn't line up properly and until the glue set it was far from rigid and needed careful bracing to stop things moving around. This simple addition took about twice as long as making the rest of the building!


The wonky staircase

Anyway here's a couple of shots of the finished model, the second one has some Valiant 1/72 Germans to give you an idea of the size of the building.

With it's height this looks like it will make a nice spot for snipers or maybe an HMG team. I just need to weather the building and paint the exposed edges of the card to improve it's looks. Despite the fiddly staircase I'm very happy with the finished model.

Some people have asked me what glue I'm using to assemble the kits so I've added a photo of the glue below. It's made by Scotch and is called 'Scapbookers Glue'. It's nice because it dries hard as iron and has two applicators, a thin nozzle and a pad for large areas.