Review

To the delight of many Santa Fe Railway modelers, Walthers has released a very creditable HO model of the mission-style station seen throughout the southwest. Capturing the look of the California missions and the Indian architecture of the southwest, this structure is readily recognizable by anyone familiar with the Santa Fe and the west. This particular kit was modeled after the Santa Fe depot in Portales, New Mexico on one of the lesser-known branches originally built by the Pecos Valley Railroad. This line ran along the Pecos River from Pecos, Texas to Eddy, New Mexico. The railroad was extended to Roswell, New Mexico in 1894, an Santa Fe eventually purchased the line.

The first depot at Portales was built of wood but a brick depot eventually replaced it. This depot was later covered with stucco and painted a pinkish-tan with turquoise door and window trim. It is this structure that Walthers used as the prototype for this kit. The Santa Fe did an extensive business with the Railway Express Agency and th Post Office, handling mail and express. The Portales station, along with others, had an attached freight house to handle the traffic. Walthers offers both of these structures as kits. The two buildings can be purchased separately, or as the combined kit covered in this review. If you want both structures, they should be constructed at the same time, as some walls and other details are eliminated when the two buildings are combined.

This is one of the best-engineered kits I have seen. Everything fits perfectly and if something seems amiss, you probably have the wrong part or you are assembling it incorrectly. TO help keep down the cost of the kit, al the detail parts are duplicated on two identical sprues, so they only had to do half the tool and die work normally required for a kit.

The entire kit is composed of plastic moldings. The plastic used seems a bit softer than the material to which I am accustomed. This allows the parts to be cut from the sprues very easily and with no distortion. All of the molded-in details are very crisp and there was no flash to be removed from any of the components.

All the parts should be painted before you begin assembly. To get the pinkish tan color I found the Floquil Flesh gives a very good base coat. I did not care for the turquoise trim on my railroad, so I used a boxcar red for the window, doors, and other detail parts. The molded red roof is very close to the color of Spanish tiles, so this was simply given a coat of Testor's Dullcoat to remove the sheen. All of the parts were then very lightly oversprayed with flat black to tone down the colors.

If there is paint where the glue surfaces meet; clean the paint off with the tip of a hobby knife before applying the glue. Again, if the parts do not mate properly, you are doing something wrong.

The window glazing is molded to the correct size and each piece has a groove molded in to make the placement exact. All of the glass for the small windows has an etched cut-glass effect molded in which gives a very nice look. The station does not have an interior so, before the walls were assembled, I sprayed the back of the walls with Testor's Dullcoat to frost them.

The base for the buildings is a brick pattern molded in a deep red color. I applied a thin wash of gray acrylic paint to the base, then wiped it off before the paint had dried. This shows the mortar pattern and tones down the plastic look of the base. There are different ways to finish the base depending on whether you are building just the depot, or the depot/freight house combination.

The roof of the depot is modeled with Spanish tiles, with gutters on the edges of the roof. To finish the roof there are two stucco-covered chimneys. A similar Spanish tile roof is added at each end of the building. The freight house has a flat roof with no detailing. I cannot find a picture of the prototype but, with the hot New Mexico summers, there surely would have to be some type of ventilation.

The instructions give directions on applying the supplied decals, but there are actually no decals. Supplied is a cardstock sheet of various depot names, Santa Fe logos, and other signs that you typically would find around a depot. Walthers states that they are making this correction in the instruction sheet. I used a black marker to cover up the white edge of the cardstock before the signs were attached to the building. Since Walthers modeled this kit from a prototype building, it would have been nice if they had included a photo of the actual station. This would make it easier to apply the various station names and logos correctly.

This is a kit that is extremely well designed, and all the component fit like a glove. The window glazing is especially noteworthy. The instruction sheet covers the building of the kit primarily using well-done drawings, but where it is needed there is text explaining the steps. I spent about ten hours painting and assembling the kit, and encountered no problems, except for the decals mentioned earlier.

Walthers has captured the look of many southwestern depots in this kit, and for the Santa Fe modeler the look will be unmistakable. Of course, there is no need to be tied to the Santa Fe, as many western stations had this general too, Whether you are an experienced modeler or someone trying a kit for the first time, this depot will provide you some very enjoyable hours.