N Scale Adventures: The Three Chocolatiers

We finished painting and building one of the kits for the small layout: Brach’s Candy Factory. Here’s the kit when it came in the mail and all the parts laid out:

Even though the kit is molded in colors, it’s still not that great. First off, the bricks are brown for the walls, but the rooftop bricks are molded light gray (the four pieces on the bottom left). Also the loading dock doors and the entrance are so bright white that it would’ve looked really toy-like. So, we decided to go ahead and paint the kit before assembly. We used acrylic paints: dark brown for the bricks, sandstone for the accents and the columns, dark forest green for the main entrance and old country white for the accents of the entrance. We also used UP harbor mist gray to create dirt effects on the loading docks. Here are the pieces after painting.

The kit is very easy to assemble. The bricks and glass panes fit snugly in their spots and it is quite fast to get the walls done.

After all four walls are done, I glued them together using the base as a guide. Walthers kits are very easy to erect thanks to the base. I used Testors liquid cement to glue the walls together which works really well and sets fast. After all four walls were up, I put the roof in and used rubber bands to hold everything together.

Here’s the building after everything dried.

Quite excitedly, I placed the building on the layout and boom! There’s the first disappointment. A standard boxcar won’t fit under the awning! In this picture, the building is next to code 80 track on WS roadbed. You can see that the boxcar door is way too high for the loading docks.

I thought maybe removing the roadbed would be sufficient, since most industry spurs don’t have the high ballast like mainlines. But even then the awning was a tad too low. In this picture you see a standard 40’ boxcar only on code 80 track.

As you can see, this boxcar door and the loading docks are very close to being aligned. I’m thinking they’d line up perfectly if this had been code 55 track. But, still, the awning is too low.

As I said above, the industrial spur I have code 80 track on WS roadbed. In order for a boxcar to fit under the awning, I had to elevate the building 1/4”. The doors don’t quite line up, but then again, once the boxcar is in place, you can’t see the loading dock, so this isn’t really an issue.

If I had to do this again, I’d glue the awning just a tad higher than what it says in the directions.

We didn’t like any of the signs or names that came with the kit, so we decided to create our own. We chose to go with The Three Chocolatiers as the name of the company. My daughter drew a logo and based on that I created the following logo using a graphics design program.