5 stall stone tom yorke roundhouse built by Mark Grubbs

[madmike3434]

Here are a total of 8 pictures of a 5 stall tom yorke designs roundhouse built from kit #113 hydrocal walls and plans in O scale.   This was part of Toms "SHOP SERIES", featuring a 3 stall roundhouse, a power house machine shop, a blacksmith shop.

This particular wonderful build was done by MARK GRUBBS using tom yorke #113 3 stall roundhouse walls. By adding extra rear walls he expanded the roundhouse to 5 stalls , but he used a total of 7 rear walls in order to get extra width in each of the engine locomotive stalls.  Mark coloured the outside stone walls using F W acrylic inks and 99% pure isopropinal alcohol mixed together in specific amounts.  Colours used on idividual stones were : sepia, antelope, burnt umber, black, cool grey.

Mark also did a great job painting and detailing inside. Notice all the great beam work and the floor.  Isn't that a good looking engine service pit.  To make everything easily visable Mark created a clear plexiglass roof and installed grandt line engine house stacks into it , complete with funnels exhaust catchers.
mike

[madmike3434]

another view

[madmike3434]

more views..........beautiful hydrocal plaster castings coloured using ink an dalcohol

[madmike3434]

custom designed enginehouse service pit

[madmike3434]

inside view

[madmike3434]

looking from the rear and seeing how rear walls are angled to form roundhouse

[madmike3434]

overhead view of roundhouse from rear

[madmike3434]

here you can see all the rear walls, 7 of them to make a 5 stall roundhouse.

In my opinion a well done roundhouse or enginehouse like Mark Grubbs has built, combined with a turntable really adds a lot of excitment to a layout. It becomes a focal point.   You can see peoples eyes lite up when the lights go on inside the RH and the turntable starts to rotate. Throw some sound into all this and well !!!!!!!!!

Now to complete the area a power house, water tank, oil depot , coal shute, wood piles, ash pit can somehow be worked into the area.

mike lynch

[Frederic Testard]

I love these walls, Mike. I'm not extremely a fan of these huge structures that take such a place on the layout, but this is nevertheless a very nice building, which begs for more structures around it (and this is when the space problem can become unsolvable...).

[madmike3434]

Frederick, i remember reading the plans for a FSM kit in HO i had purchased called the JOHN ALLEN SPECIAL, it was Johns classic 2 stall wood engine house, a blacksmith shop , a brick base water tank and an ash pit and thrown into that mix was also his #70 design a passenger depot along with freight house .

What i remember most about it was the way George Sellios had drawn the layout plan for the whole scene it was too take i think 24" wide x 40 or so inches long.  I thought at the time that seemed awfully big for what it was , so i proceeded to lay it all out on a piece of plywood .  Well he was right , it did take that kind of space.

I know that the stock Yorke #113 3 stall roundhouse takes 17 3/16 along the side walls and 17 3/8 across the back walls.  If one is planning on having a roundhouse or a 2 stall engine house on their layout they must be aware before hand about the space required and plan properly for it.  I had many people ask me about the Yorke castings & roundhouse footprint only to eventually say they did not have the room. Jerry Kitts of foothill model works just had this same problem of space and wanting to use the yorke roundhouse walls in an inquiry too me.

But whats a layout without a roundhouse/enginehouse on it. ?
mike

[Ray Dunakin]

Nice, especially the stone wall castings.