Fueling around - What a Weekend!

For those in the UK this weekend for many was taken up by the new past time of 'Find the Fuel' and that is fuel not fool. If you were actually looking for the fool you would have come to the right place reading this blog authored by a fool! However, back to the story. Mrs Woody's car was almost on empty and needing two thirds of a tank of diesel a week for work she needed fuel. No problem. At least one filling station near us would have some I proclaimed just like a fool. In a 15 mile radius we ended up trying 13 locations. At one we came within getting three cars away from the remaining pump before it ran dry. The last place we tried actually had some fuel - at £1.59 a liter! In normal circumstances I would have driven away to find somewhere a little more economical but needs must. At least Mrs Woody was happy even if my wallet was not! 

Strangely enough my plan developed several years ago for my 009 narrow gauge layout has always had a service station as one of the buildings to be included. The service station will be definitely 1960s when petrol was plentiful, costing 3 and 6 a gallon (not like the £1.59 a liter I paid on Sunday), when you got quadruple green shield stamps, tokens towards the real genuine plastic beaker set and all served to you by an attendant who filled the car up and checked the tyres! Those of younger years will be scratching their heads but that was how it worked back then! 

Anyway as I could sit more comfortably Sunday evening as my back pocket no longer contained a fat wallet but a much slimmed down version after paying for fuel, I took the opportunity to start on getting the various buildings together and placing them on the layout to get a feel for how they looked and where the other scenic items such as the road would fit. 

The first two buildings are the Dapol General Store and Service Station kits. 

The kits were originally produced in the late 50's early 60's by Kitmaster before becoming part of the Airfix range. Dapol then took on the moulds and have produced the entire original range as well as adding a few new ones. The kits are fairly basic but as my layout is set in that 50's/60's period the character of the buildings is just right. For moulds that are well over 50 years old now the parts are still coming out well with just a few areas where there is some flash that needs to be trimmed away.

The kits have been semi assembles with a mixture of glue and masking tape - I just need the basic building shell so that I can see the effect that each building will have. Full construction will come later. One thing I will highlight is that when gluing it is important to get parts square. When gluing the walls of the General Store together I looked for my set square but in my chaotic area of a workbench I could not find it. The next best thing was to use part of the roof moulding as that would be a right angel - sometimes you have to think outside of the box or in this case, as the kit came in a bag, outside of that!

Having got the basic structures together they are at the moment placed like this.

More buildings to come but I am getting a better sense of whether what I have planned for many years will actually work in reality or have I just been a fool!