Modelling the Frontenac Floor & Wall Tile Factory

The long, low, skylit factory buildings of the Frontenac Floor & Wall Tile Company Limited plant just north of CN's Outer Station were sprawling and single-storied. To model two of them, I used some surplus harbourfront buildings with the correct peaked roof and good window spacing:

Rather than purchasing window castings to get the proper multi-pane windows, I used the two-pane castings that came with this structure. Cutting strips of grey paper, I glued these in place:

Adding the skylights and gluing the two walls together, the resulting long, low structure got brick skylight ends added, and door openings have been moved down to ground level:

To limit my structure palette and blend in this structural flat with the background, I chose a base of dark grey:

This spur will not only be jointly-served by CN and CP, as was the prototype, but it will also host multiple car types at various car spots: boxcars, open hoppers and the occasional tank car:

The 'foundation' is applied to the low side of the building:

Then weathering with a light white mortar wash. Brightly-lit interior photos cut from a magazine enliven the interior which was otherwise either too dark or too wall-like!

Time to apply some of the neat hand-painted black-and-white lettering of the prototype. I used prototype photos that were copied-pasted to a Word document then hand-enhanced with fine black and white markers. A better result than my attempt at hand-lettering at top left:

A finished sign, laid on a surplus brick wall from an Ole King Coal kit (above) and glued on and embossed (below):

The kilns are an interesting shape, and though I would like to have them sticking up behind the structural flat, from the roofline, I haven't quite figured out the proper arrangement. When casting around in the junk box for some kiln-shaped items, I came across this vintage nylon spool that I've had for decades. With the Dremel tool, I cut it in half, painted and weathered, and now it makes two stand-in kilns:

One potential location, TBD:

The earliest photo I've seen of the factory shows an elaborate set of lettering, built on top of the roof, no doubt to give greater visibility for the low-slung buildings to the townspeople who lived south of here. I used Slater's lettering to produce this sign:

With some yard trackage in the foreground, here's a 'vintage' view of the Frontenac factory. That building in foreground is a repurposed Sherritt/United Grain Growers fertilizer elevator, now serving as a grinding building for the feldspar. More weathering, piles of coal, details and DIRT needs to be added to the factory, but it is currently in service!

Frontenac finally fills a fallow corner of the layout, provides three more car spots switchable by both CN and CP. For all your tile needs!

Final arrangement of the office building. I used a POLA pickle factory end, with its unique roofline, moving the bottle kilns toward the corner of the layout.

Trackside view. Office closest to camera, then boxcar loading, followed by feldspar unloading and oil/coal unloading. Piles of coal, oil unloading equipment and a small platform added trackside, plus some scenery. Not a lot of vegetation around the prototype!

Feldspar crusher, with piles of feldspar made from plasticene. I ground up some pink brick mortar with pliers to form powder. Two of the four bottle kilns are at the left. They might eventually be replaced by a printed photo of similar kilns.

Drone view of the spur, served by both CN and CP: