Concrete floors for Port Dock

Common in the construction of railway locomotive service facilities was the use of ash pits for collecting ash, but also access to brake gear and mechanical ash-pan servicing. At Port Dock there used to a "running shed" or locomotive depot that was used to store and maintain a local locomotive fleet for use around the yard and in the port area in general. Duties included local goods shunting, pilot duties for the station and goods movements up to the nearby Gillman Yard, but locomotives were often used to deliver and collect goods from Dry Creek further away. On my model, I wanted to have that capacity to receive and dispatch goods to and from Commercial Street, which in essence are trains to and from Adelaide or Mile End goods yard. Port Dock had all the connecting lines to the local area from Adelaide and was quite extensive. The running shed had ash pits just outside the front of the shed. The four road shed was a simple rectangular shape with a small workshop off to the side.

The running sheds at Port Dock. Photo taken by Douglas A Colquhoun.
The two ash pits were on the two central roads.

  

The ash pits.

The running shed floor.

The ash pits and the floor for the 4 road running shed. Balsa-wood was used between the tracks and on the sleepers to build up the height to about 1.5mm from the top of the rails, then 1mm plasticard was layered over the top. This leaves about 0.5mm clear of the rail head so cleaning of the rails isn't made difficult. Then the joins and cracks were scribed into the surface ready for painting and weathering. Weathering powders were used to highlight the scribed lines and give that dirty concrete floor effect.

The styrene is then painted with "concrete" enamel - two coats let to dry then powders used to get that grimy look.
I used an "Exacto" knife to scratch in the lines, but instead of using the sharp edge, use the blunt edge (use it
upside down), run lines at random connecting the tooled cement lines (which were also done the same way)

Ash pits completed with the pits made by building up depth using balsawood strips glued under
the baseboard to create the rectangle pit sides and ends. Then a piece of styrene added for the floor.
A set of steps at one end in each pit are yet to be installed.

The ballast will be filled in around these floors to "bed" them in to the flat ballast and dirt filled surface required. Till next - happy modelling...!