“Model railroading and a 3D-printer”

I have been working over the last several months with designing a model to 3D print for my planned n-scale model railroad. I wanted to do something local and through a little research I was able to find an excellent place to model. I have to start this week by telling a little history of the town of Newburg, MO. Newburg was founded by the St. Louis-San Francisco Railroad (Frisco) in 1883-84. The town was a major refueling port for the steam trains between St. Louis and Springfield, MO.

The first two structures built for the purpose of the railroad were the Frisco roundhouse and the “Railroad Hotel and Eating House”, known today as the Houston House. The Frisco roundhouse is no longer standing, but a local park is built on it’s remains and you can still see the stone walls that were the outer edge of the turn-about.

Construction began on the three-story hotel building in 1883 by William H. Harris, the former operator of a hotel and restaurant in Dixon. Hearing about Frisco’s plans for Newburg he set out to establish the first hotel and restaurant to support the travelers and railway employees. The Houston House served the community for three generations of the Harris family before the railroad no longer provided the necessary traffic to the community and fire that broke out on the third floor left the building unusable in the 1970s. The Newburg Community Revitalization Program Group purchased the building in 2004 and currently runs a soup kitchen weekly in hopes to raise enough funds to restore the building to it’s former glory.

It is this building that I began to model for starting my railroad. You might think Newburg is a pretty small town to model, but you would be wrong. Basing my models off of Newburg, in the late 1800’s brings a lot to be modeled. Newburg had one of the only three Roundhouses on the Frisco line in Missouri. It was a primary place for steam engine repair and was necessary to house engines that were used in teams to climb hill between Newburg and Rolla. These spare engines were needed to pull heavy loads, but once past the hill a single engine could make the trek to St. Louis. Some of the engines serviced at Newburg only made the short trip to Rolla assisting other engines and returned to Newburg with no load.

There was a complex track system in Newburg allowing it to service and refuel multiple trains. This went on until the invention of a refueling system that allowed a steam engine to refuel on the run. A scoop collected water from under the track while an overhead mechanism dumped coal in the tender. Unfortunately for Newburg, it was a prime location for these rapid refueling stations due to the deep creek flowing near the rail line. After retrofitting the line with these new rapid fueling stations at Newburg, the trains no longer stopped in the town and tourism pretty much stopped.

I stated the model last year based off of historical pictures of the building and measurements of the existing structure. One of the difficulties in modeling for 3-D printing is the level of detail is limited. My current printer is capable of showing details as small as 3-inches in the real world on the n-scale model. So things like door-knobs look like single dots of plastic. I wanted to make the model realistic enough to be printed at any model scale, so it is modeled life-size in a program called OpenSCAD. This means I have spent a lot of time adding details that will never be seen once the model is printed, but the model can inspire the community to rebuild Houston House to it’s glory days.

This is the issue model railroaders experience with 3-D printing, we want the models to be 100% accurate to the world around us and as a result tend to go overboard with the details. We are then disappointed when we finally print the design and find that we cannot see the doorknobs and window latches. I dream of a day when 3-D printing gets good enough to show real detail on small models, until then my models will look great on the screen and good on the layout. Until next week stay safe and learn something new.

Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to sh*******@**********rd.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.