Construction - Cattle Dock

The Cattle Dock

The cattle dock at Bakewell was very important, as Bakewell was the market town for the local area and a lot of livestock was transported by rail from outlying stations every market day.

However, cattle docks are not the most interesting of subjects, and therefore there are very few photos of the prototype available. Thankfully, when Stan Roberts was planning his iconic model of Bakewell, he took photos of just about everything, so here's one of his photos:

Bakewell Cattle Dock

Construction

There's really not a lot to the construction, it is after all just a platform with some railings on top, but here's what I did:

Using 40thou (2mm) styrene sheet, I cut out these bits:

Lots of Bits

Working with the model upside down, I added an end and one side:

One side done

Then, I added some internal partitions to add rigidity and support the top surface

Internal partitions

I added the other side, and the supports for the sloped end

Slope detail

And here it is the right way up.

Right way Up

The basic structure was then clad in Slater's 7mm Stone Courses

Stone cladding 1
Stone cladding 2
Stone cladding 3

I added a single course of the same stone to the top, to portray the thickness of the wall, and then gave it a base coat of Humbrol Matt Acrylic No.63 Sand.

Stone cladding top
base coat

I picked out individual stones in various shades of darker brown, using Humbrol Matt Acrylic No.29 Dark Earth.

paint details

and then applied dilute washes of Humbrol Matt Acrylic No.91 Black Green, and Humbrol Matt Acrylic No.30 Dark Green to end up with the following

final washes

I decided the top surface would be stone setts, but I used Slater's 4mm Stone courses as I wanted the larger size stone and rougher more irregular appearance.

So I started with a base coat of Humbrol Matt Acrylic No.R413 Engineer's Grey, and then washed it with a dilute mix of Humbrol Matt Acrylic No.32 Dark Grey, followed by Humbrol Matt Acrylic No.91 Black Green.

stone surface
washed over
dirtied finish

The completed platform looks like this:

final look
another final look
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