14: The stile to facilitate passage over the tank berm
was made from two segments of Central Valley stair-
way from the CV Steps and Ladders set.
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Getting Real Column - 9
Light Gray. The flat area around the tanks was usually dirt, for
which I used Woodland Scenics Dark Soil.
The Walthers kit provides a stile for workmen to cross the
slanted sides of the berm. Such stiles are common on the pro-
totype, and I have seen them both with and without hand-
rails. I felt the Walthers one was kind of oversize, so I didn’t
use the kit stile. Instead, I used some styrene steps from the
Central Valley Steps and Ladders set, no. 1602. This set was
also used for other parts of this project. Stiles like these are
often painted a dark color, or may be unpainted wood. For
mine, see (14).
The vertical tanks
For the Walthers vertical tanks themselves, I used only three
of the four provided in the McGraw kit. The kit tanks are rep-
resented as welded tanks. The kit’s weld lines are a bit heavy,
a good two scale inches high, from which any welder I know
would recoil in horror. I replaced them with the decal-trans-
fer weld lines from Archer Fine Transfers (set no. AR88018).
These do indeed look better, but unless your tanks are going
to be close to the
front of the layout
(mine are not), the
gain in appearance is
probably not worth
the effort.
I wanted to duplicate
the common proto-
type appearance of
non-identical tanks, so
I simply omitted one
course on one of the
Walthers tanks. I also
decided to represent
it as an older, riveted
tank, and accordingly
15: The Central Valley stairs and
railing (black) received a hori-
zontal top walk with Evergreen
styrene (white).
15
MRH-Mar 2014
