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Modifying The N Scale Architect Alto tower kit

Written by Ian MacMillan

Saturday, 07 April 2007

Alto Tower

Recently Russ at The N Scale Architect has released a kit that I have been waiting for, and helped do the research on. The addition of ALTO tower to their line of craftsman kits, comes as a welcome from modelers of the PRR, PC, CR, and NS. The kit consists of laser cut plywood, clear plastic sheet for windows, cast stairs and chimney, and full color shingle sheets. The kit is fairly straight forward to build. Russ designed the kit to represent the way the tower looked in the Victorian Era, that way modelers of all eras could use the tower. I decided to put together an article detailing how to update the tower to CR/NS standards

Materials Needed

Above are the items you will need, basic kit building tools such as an X-acto knife, glue and paints. I choose to use tacky glue to put it together as I find that wood glue takes a while to set up.

Figure 1

I decided to paint the tower in the gray and white paint, used by NS and CR. The white is a basic acrylic white paint, the gray was mixed to create gray closer to the proto type. Paint all of PLATE 3 in the gray as shown in Figure 1. Paint all of PLATE 1 in white.

Figure 2

Here is where we begin to modify the kit. A lot of the window panes were removed over the years, using mostly double pane windows as replacements. You can also see that there are some windows that have been blanked out. To keep the kit simple to modify, I left all the windows the height provided in the kit, and just removed panes. Follow the instructions on the kit to build the font wall, and add the trim. Modify the front bay window by making the first three windows double pane. On the fourth, use scrap wood from the kit PLATES to fill in the window space as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 3

Glue the font window to the bays. The two smaller windows on the sides of the bays had their upper panes boarded in, and a single pane on the bottom. I forgot do to this to my kit (Figure 3).

Figure 4

The Westward wall is shown in Figure 4. Remove the windows, and fill with scrap wood from the kit as shown. The Northern wall, as shown in Figure 5 is the rear wall. The entire upper window was section was removed. Scrap wood and a large window were fitted to create the rear window section. The Eastern wall has a few modifications, including boarding up of the third window, and the window towards the Northern face, still had its panes, but the glass was removed and replaced with wood as showin in Figure 6.

Figure 5

Figure 6

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