Modelling the Ontario Street Fire Hall

I didn't dream of building this structure...ever. But being in the neighbourhood with my repurposed CP yard across Ontario Street from City Hall and building the Kingston Milling Co. mill, the Ontario Street Fire Hall was literally in their backyard. And here we are.

The toughest part as always was finding the feedstock. It's not like a kit can be purchased to build it. So I made use of some $2 train-show find DPM brick walls as the right and left wings astride the hose tower. I used some parts from a Walthers Western Avenue Fire Station purchased from fellow ARK member Michael Pasch for the tower, with a DPM arched window. I used two Walthers warehouse windows to fill the top of the arches, cut to fit and painted white. Paper limestone for the foundation. You'll notice there's no front door, so entry will be via the big doors I guess!

I had some dormer windows from a mansard roof on a previous Ogilvie Flour Fill build. The only problem is that the roof slope was not as great as it needed to be. So this fire station has linebacker shoulders. I also didn't want the tower to be so tall that it would get in the way on the layout. So this build is my version of the prototype! I used some roof details from the Heljan courthouse kit for the roof base and filled in all the other walls and tower walls:

Black paint toned down the mansard roof, with paper limestone on the end walls.

Copy-paste-print from Googlemaps street views of the prototype:

Not too many in-process photos here. I was too busy building for two days. Michael Myers took and posted a picture of a limestone rubble wall at Peter's Drugs in Portsmouth Village and I copied-pasted-printed it for the end walls, as I did the quoins found online, fussy-cut to shape and glued on at the corners. I cut one of the DPM bay doors and glued it open, the other shut. The tower is made of black cardstock, and the end chimneys balsa wrapped in printed brick paper. 

I'm not at all sure where it's going on the layout, but it was fun to build. The fire hall has had so many lives, and is in storage use during my modelled era, after is days as a working firehall and before its 2014 makeover as a tourist eatery. The Waterous looks right at home: