The station I wanted would have to be simple, because I’m a novice scratch builder and I didn’t want a station that would take years to build. I was looking for something I could piece together in the evenings that would keep me busy for maybe three or four weeks.
On the other hand, I also wanted a station with a clock tower. That may seem to contradict my want for a simple design, but the focus of my layout is passenger trains. One whole side of it will be a passenger terminal, platforms and station. My layout is really very small so I won’t be building another station. Therefore, this will be the keystone structure on my layout. A passenger station this significant should have a clock tower.
I was thinking of a station made of brick. A wood-frame station wouldn’t have the stature I was looking for, but a station make of cut stone would be too overpowering. A brick building, something along the lines of the Missoula station on the Milwaukee Road, would be just about right. I would have built the Missoula station except that it looks a little too complicated for me and the tower doesn’t have a clock in it.
This postcard image of the C&NW passenger station in Sioux City was the closest match to my picky requirements. It’s fairly simple, it’s made of brick, it probably dates to the early 1900′s, and it’s got a clock tower. Granted, the clock tower appears to lack a clock face, technically making it just a tower, but that’s something I can fix.
The post card image is not very detailed, so I spent a couple weeks trying to find a better one. I’ve heard that you can find whatever you need on the internet, and that might be true of many things but it’s not true when it comes to finding more photographs of this station. I did find the web site of the C&NW Historical Society, where you’d think I’d be able to find a better photograph of it, but you’d be wrong. They’ve got an on-line library of photographs so extensive it would make your head spin, from bridges to depots large and small, but this building is just not on their roster.
I didn’t know where else to look for photos, and I didn’t want to wait any longer to start, so I sat down with the post card image to see if I could figure out how to build a model from it. I was going to arbitrarily decide that the windows on the ground floor were about four feet wide and go from there, until I saw the guy standing next to the side entrance. He must be about six feet tall, and the door is probably six and a half or seven feet tall.
I went with six and a half, or seventy-eight inches, slapped a ruler against the image on my computer screen and worked out the height of the building at about thirty-five feet — six guys tall. That looked about right. So if the windows were six to eight feet tall, could I get them all to fit in the fact of a building thirty-five feet tall and get it to look right?
The windows all appear to be the same width, but the ones along the ground floor seem to be taller than the windows on the upper floors. I decided the ground floor windows were eight feet tall, and the upper floors had six-foot-tall windows.
The gap between the upper floor windows is narrower than the gap between the ground floor windows and the second-floor windows, so I made the upper gap four feet and the lower gap six feet.
That make it thirty feet from the top of the third-floor row of windows to the bottom of the first-floor row, leaving just five feet. The foundation appeared to be about as high, but not quite, as the gap between the ground-floor and second-floor windows, so five feet was just about right.
I guessed the windows are about twice as tall as they are wide. For the six-foot windows that would be three feet, but four feet for the eight-foot windows, so I split the difference and went with three and a half feet.