I must admit that I don’t read or subscribe to all the model railroad magazines all the time.  As I get older, the number of “must have” subscriptions have begun to dwindle.  So, I was quite surprised to see an article in the June 2026, issue of Model Railroader that struck me as one of those “hey, I can do that” moments.  It was an article on building a CB&Q livestock scale and scale house … apparently quite common around stock pens.  The drawings were very good with a brief history of the scales (it boils down to the fact that livestock (cattle and sheep on my layout) are weighed before shipping, as they lose weight in transit.

The entire article was for the HO modeler.  Since I model in On30 (O scale), I had to do some fiddling ahead of time.  The author (Nelson Moyer, MMR) provided the information that conversion is easily done by copying the HO drawings at 181.4%.   I was too cheap to go to a stationery store with a big flatbed printer, so I told my home printer to do the job.  The home printer told me it could print at 181% or 182%; nothing in between.  So, by bending and folding the article to fit the magazine, I printed out the drawings at 181% (close enough).

In general, I followed the sequence in the article, with a few changes as I deemed necessary.  After all, the engineers at the Jemez & Rio Grande are a very conservative (cheap) group.  To build the scale foundation, the article calls for a single piece of styrene approximately 10 scale inches thick.  I did not have any sheet styrene that thick, so I built mine out of scrap styrene from my “scrap styrene” box (Fig. 1).   After the glue cured, I did some sanding and painting and light weathering.

I’m not going to go through the entire build, but I will point out my own deviations from the article or to point out some ways to help things go faster.  For example, there is quite a variety of strip wood sizes involved.  Make sure that you have enough before the build!  After waiting for two weeks to get mine, I started dying the wood after scraping the surfaces with the teeth of a razor saw and a wire brush and using my own dilution of India ink and isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol.

Yes, there should be a gap around the perimeter of the scale.  After all, it is mounted on a set of springs to accommodate the weight of the cow (Fig. 2).  The trapdoor in the center of the scale is a piece of very thin styrene sheet.  The lift ring came from my scrap box of “detail items” and the hinges were made from doctored reefer hinges with small styrene rod for the hinge.  Of course, I had to weather before continuing assembly as it would be covered by the structure walls, etc.  I used acrylic paint (charcoal) to paint everything and a wash of “rust” (India ink and rust acrylic) followed by a little Pan Pastel weathering (Fig. 3).

I build walls, gates, and rafters all in the same way.  I cut out the drawing of the piece I will be building and tape it to the work surface.  Then I tape a piece of waxed paper over the drawing and double-sided tape on the waxed paper to hold the pieces in place until glued together (Fig. 4).  That’s as close as I get to a jig, in most cases.

I built and mounted the gates to each end of the scale.  The author provides some suggestions about creating the hinges, but I used a set of Grandt Line hinges since there was a good supply in my “detail items” box.  Of course, these were weathered much like the floor trapdoor (Fig. 5).

My first alteration was to the walls of the scale house.  The drawings call for only three 4×4’s to hold up the roof and a covering of 1×6’s, each being some 18’ long!  It may be that the CB&Q could afford those extra-long boards, but not the J&RG. I opted for five 4×4” vertical posts and shorter pieces of 1×6’s (Fig. 6).  Similarly, the drawings call for 7 rafters to support the roof.   I hate to spend a lot of time building things that nobody will ever see, so I opted for five rafters, each centered over the 4×4 uprights.  Having three pole-barns on our property, I surveyed the construction and decided that those modifications were appropriate.

The scale box was constructed from scrap styrene to the approximate dimensions on the diagram.  The only scale box I ever saw in New Mexico was made from sheet metal so I opted out of the scribed siding. It was painted boxcar red and weathered (Fig.7).  I even spent a day making a dial with lens on it before I realized nobody would ever see it.

The roof was made from lengths of 1×2 to support the roofing material (in my case, corrugated metal).  Again, for a building that sort of protected the scale from snow and sun, I opted for 3-foot centers.  The interesting part was the roofing itself!  In my “structure parts” box I found lengths of “corrugated metal” made from cardstock.   So, I sprayed both sides with a light gray primer and then used pan pastels to color and weather the exposed surfaces of the roof (Fig. 8).   The roof cap is made from cardstock that was painted with gray Copic pens then edge-painted with a red-brown Copic pen.

So, there you have it!  A neat little structure to sit next to your stockyard shipping point (Fig. 9).  The narrow-gauge D&RGW had many of these at various long-distance shipping points, so you might even want to build more than one!  As usual, I still have to figure out where to put mine on the layout!