I’m modeling the early 40s in HO and I have a freight depot on my layout that I’m trying to correctly position so that the trackside platform height is level with the bottom floor of a boxcar. The mainline track is up on cork roadbed.
Right now I temporarily have N-scale cork sheeting underneath the depot to elevate it up but it’s still on the low side. I’ll either add more N-scale cork sheeting to shim it up further or replace it with HO-scale cork sheeting. I don’t want to get neurotic about the platform height but I would like for it to be close.
My question is this: For those of you who have addressed this on your own layout, did you find it difficult to make the ground surrounding the elevated depot’s foundation fit into the terrain and scheme of the rest of your layout, without your depot looking like it’s perched on top of a pitcher’s mound?
The rear of the freight depot has a sliding door and loading area so that goods can be loaded and unloaded onto/off of trucks. The loading area will empty out onto an asphalt road.
Are you building up the foundation or are you building up the ground the freight house sits on?
The ground can be level with the tracks and the foundation or building can be such that the dock height matches the car floor height (within a couple inches.).
If you are having to add that much cork under your depot, the problem amy be that the building DOESN’T have a foundation. Have you considered using styrene or balsa or foam to build up a foundation for the building, not the ground, but an actual foundtion walls, so its at the right height. Raise the building, not the ground.
I took a piece of 1 inch pink foam and cut it to fit the building. I then carved the foam to look like a rock foundation. After painting, I cut a hole in the foam where it sat and placed the rock foundation in the hole so everything was at the right height. If I would have been working on plywood, I would have trimmed the height of the rock foundation to the correct height. Obviously, I could have carved a stone, brick or block foundation as well. I then used ground goop and the usual landscaping to blend it all in.
