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A New Roundhouse for the Clover LeafWarner ClarkBy mid 1923 The Toledo, St. Louis & Western (The CloverLeaf Route) was merged into the New York, Chicago & St.Louis Railroad (The Nickel Plate Road). It is the east end, or thefirst subdivision of the railroad now known as The Clover LeafDistrict of the NKP that I am modeling.I built a roundhouse (mostly from memory) based on onefrom a small southern Michigan town. Probably built aroundthe turn of the 20 th Century, the prototype was a six stall, brickbuilding with an attached machine shop, stores, crew registryand locker room, and enginehouse foreman’s office. As aroundhouse rat, I would call it Lake Shore & Michigan Southerngeneric. It was served by an Armstrong turntable, whichcould easily accommodate Mikados of most classes.Because of space constraints, I modeled only three stalls.Not counting the attached structures, my roundhouse is 24¾”deep, 12” wide at the front and 23” wide at the rear. My boilerroom is 2¾” wide by 4½” and the machine shop, stores andcrew area is 23¾” by 4¼”. Each stall will house a locomotiveabout 23” long. The stall tracks are laid on a 9 degree orientationfrom each other. The front of the roundhouse is 10½”from the turntable pit (Photo 1).All the load bearing walls and doorposts sit on a randomcut stone foundation made from ¼” x ½” basswood strips thathave Plastruct stone sheets laminated to one side with waterbasedwood filler trowelled on top, painted a limestone colorand highlighted with an India ink wash.I laid code 125 rails throughout my terminal and used 9”x9” ties inside the roundhouse. The rail on the linear ties borderingthe sides of the inspection/service pits in each stall issecured with CA. I painted all rail, ties, stairs and service pits1with Floquil’s Grimy Black paint. I also ran a little super gluedown the pit sides to give the appearance of oil and waterstains. Drybrushing the stairs with white paint brought out theirdetail. The Clover Leaf’s Assoc. Vice President of Grunge, RichBourgerie, helped me in this regard.The roundhouse walls are made from a Gatorfoam boardcore and American Builders’ Supply styrene brick laminate.I used polyurethane glue like Gorilla Glue to laminate thebrick sheets since it will not attack the polystyrene core of theGatorfoam. I laminated sheets to both sides of the wall sections.The brick arches are a nice touch to the doorways. Theywere cut and glued on the walls after cutting the doorways.The exterior pilasters are 1/2” x 3/32” styrene strip, and theinside columns are 1/8” x 5/16” styrene strip. ) I laminated thebrick to the vertical columns using Neville Rossitier’s methodJuly/Aug ’09 - O Scale Trains • 15