The fictitious New Albany Vitriolic Company (NAV), largest of the industrial plants served by my HO scale 1930s-era Hillside and Eastern Railroad, needed a building in which to assemble and load on flatcars some of the massive equipment they produce.

The Walthers^TM Car Shop proved to be a very good fit for both the need and the available real estate.  The kit is well-made, and most parts go together nicely after a little cleanup.  Be aware, however, that this building is big, and tends to overwhelm selectively compressed structures, such as the water tank kit I had hoped to use in the same plant.

As closely as the Car Shop fit the need, however, there were a few changes I had to make.

• Because I wanted to run cars inside the building for loading, the building needed working doors.  Working tracks inside meant that sooner or later I would probably need a removable roof.
• While trying various locations for the building, I saw that by narrowing the ends just a little, I could gain a few more inches of needed track and still leave plenty of room for cars to pass on nearby tracks.  The floor plan on the right illustrates the changes I made.
• I also wanted to try some special painting techniques on this building.

While any one of these issues would be a good reason to document what I did, each is independent enough of the others to be a separate topic. 

A photo of the north elevation.

That's why I documented my experiences as a set of web pages using HTML, so the reader could pursue whichever path was of the most interest.  I also documented the mistakes I made, so that perhaps new ways can be found to accomplish this.