We’re smart men, here. We can do this. How hard is it to design a simple roof for our Hotel Américain in downtown Paris?

A simple roof would be a challenge on this structure, given the two triangular wings that extend off the building’s otherwise flat front. Anything beyond a flat roof requires some pretty fancy angle work up there in the eaves.

I employed my old standby design favorite, Google SketchUp. If you haven’t worked with this software before, you are in for a treat. It comes free from Google, and is worth every penny! Seriously, this is very powerful software for designing and rendering structures in 3D. If you look in the Plans section of our archive here at the Paris to Peking Railway you’ll see a fully SketchedUp plan for a simple shed. I built the shed a little differently than planned, but the exercise of visualizing it made construction much simpler.

Designing a simple roof on a simple rectangular is quite, well, simple. You find the centerline on each of your short walls and raise supports for the roof’s ridge pole from there. Connect the ridge pole to each of the four corners and boom, the roof is done for you.

Even the complex roof required by the Hotel Américain is simple when using this method, and is in fact quite attractive. Add a few dormers, perhaps flesh out that ridge line over the triangular extensions and you could have a really nice looking building.

Francois Mansart, however, designed the classically French roof away back around the French baroque era. You’ve seen the Mansard Roof, with its flat top and angled sides, sometimes with gently curving sides around its dormers. Crackers! That’s a lot of structure up there! It was a big hit during the Second French Empire of Napoleon III…we  here in California are especially grateful to Napoleon III. He attempted to take over Mexico and place himself on the throne there. The Mexicans beat him at the city of Puebla on May 5, 1862, taking down an army twice their size and ending his plans for taking their country from them. That, my friend, is why we celebrate Cinco de Mayo. Waiter, another Dos Equis, please!

All that notwithstanding, I’m afraid the Mansard Roof was more than a challenge for my meager SketchUp skills. It’s those dormers! How do you work the line where the horizontal edge of the dormer roof meets the main roof? Oy!

But you get the idea…the key to the Mansard Roof lies in creating a reduced scale image of the ceiling of the topmost floor of the structure. Reducing the square footage of the top of the structure results in the characteristic flat roof of the Mansard and sets the angle for the pitch of the roof.

My daddy was a draftsman in the days before the computers took his job away, and I think I still have one of his French Curve templates. I’ll see if I can find that to make an attractive and French-looking curve for the roof. I’m not too worried about the height of the roof…obviously it can’t be too tall, but clearly there are living quarters up there for starving artists and poets…it is Paris, after all!

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There’s a reason why people do what they do. Musicians are generally gifted or talented in music, painters in painting, dancers in dancing, and architects in, well, architecting.

They say it never rains in California, but, man it pours. We’ve seen a long series of storms, each slamming in on a weekend…and I’m talking rain, here, buckets and gallons and other large volumes. We’re in the middle of a whopper El Nino, a drought-ending series of powerful winter downpours.

But the rain falls on the weekends. And I don’t get home from my job at the Evil Empire until after the sun, she sets. These two facts together mean that the railroad projects have moved indoors.

Last year I discovered Google SketchUp and used it to create a pretty nifty track plan. This time, due to darkness and dampness, I decided it’s time to lay out a plan for Paris.

Now, my plan is not done yet, but, seriously, I’ve got about eight hours into this design. There are roads lined out, and I have a general idea of where the buildings will be.

But the problem is with SketchUp. Oh, the program runs great, and it’s easy and fun and all that. The problem is that it’s easy and fun and all that! The program allows you to add all sorts of detail, and that’s the danger! Look at that big building with all those angled roof panels: I spent a good two hours on those windows! You can actually make each pane of glass in the windows transparent…but you have to click on each individual pane on each window to make it so…that’s a lot of clicking!

As you can see, the large three-storied building across the street has yet to be detailed. It is, in fact, in the wrong place as there appears to be no sidewalk. That means the building’s depth will go down, which means I’ll probably just delete it and start over.

Now, about those columns: they sure are ghastly! Perhaps a building-front skin will hide some of the river rocks from which they are made.

The station itself will stretch between the two columns. It will be backed against the fence, with the platform stretching out to the rails.

But, finishing the plan for the station, while critical to the overall success of the railway, requires more hours on the SketchUp. More hours!

In making the plan, it’s easy to get lost in creating a virtual layout…my brother and I said almost the same thing at the same time: who needs to build it if you can lay it out on a computer?

Because Garden Railroading is Real Railroading, that’s why, or, uh, who. We’re modelers, aren’t we? We build, don’t we? Do we plan? Heck no! I mean, yes, but not for the sake of planning, but for the sake of building! That’s why dancers dance and painters paint – because we’re builders! BUILDERS UNITE!

That being said, I’m going back to SketchUp and finish my plan. Because I’m a builder! And we’ll always have Paris, sweetheart.