Plant City Depot MOC Phase One - Completed!

It has finally happened - The depot is built!

The Plant City Depot was built at Drane and Collins in the namesake city around 1909... It served ACL and Plant System railroads until the SCL took over. Station duty was removed though the depot was preserved as a member of the National Register of Historic Places, namely in 1974.

The depot is now the City's Welcome Center and provides tourist info plus guides, magazines, timetables, and ATCS displays and model railroads for railbuffs who visit.

My replication project, for future inclusion in GFLUG and FLUG displays especially when Plant City gets to happen, was started on May 22, 2011 with the bare bones and has been halted days later, especially when I felt stumped with what are now the pneumatic elements you see on the facade. I reinstated work around the middle of June, with a faithful commitment date of June 30 for completion. Soon I learned and quickly realized that I did not have enough roof elements (slope bricks) to finish, in neither the prototype color (gray), the close to proto (dark gray), nor my best fit due to corner and end pieces, black. To maintain focal quality on the model black was primarily chosen because of the strength of the color, though at any time I can change it though such a move is costly. On July 7 filling the Pick-A-Brick cups at Orlando, I found two gracious pieces that told me "here you go, Tolga, now finish it"... the LIC, unlike the Miami store, boasted black 2x2 and 2x4 45º slopes, essential for this. Picking up 47 2x4s, and 295 2x2s (eyeballed, and unfortunately unneeded 2x2 bricks went in the cup), among many other interesting parts, it was finally seen phase one would be complete. Well, what is phase one? Let me show you...

The Project is divided into three phases:

• Phase one is simply maintaining that there is a building. External detail is not the priority here except for the dark red fence.
• Phase two is the inception of interior detail into the MOC. This is much simpler to do but I wanted to keep focusing on the first phase's roofing. I expect to finish this in about a week.
• Phase three is the exterior platform style roof that will box in the US&S signal that I did do (though it's hard to design a tricolor). It also includes landscaping and any other Depot structure that may be needed. This may be a laggy phase, with no commitment, but I know I'll be done by November at the latest.

I managed to crush the depot into about 1.5 baseplates by one, though the exterior is supposed to be longer. However, the depot is the focus of the Plant City diorama, and it needs to get enough attention to be recognizable as a LEGO Plant City, after all.