Denver's Union Station

Denver's Union Station research

This project started in 2017 with basic research about the station. Original architectural plans were found in the Denver Public Library's online photo repository and were pieced together to develop a good visual reference for the station. This was printed out and was a placeholder on the layout until 2020. Turns out I undersized the plans. I took several trips to Denver of the years and took detailed measurements and photos of the station.

Platform Construction

Union Station's platform was constructed first. The undground walkway from the station was drawn out in CAD and cut on my CNC router. Sign boards from Lowe's were used as the signs are made from styrene. Railings were fabicated from Phosphor Bronze wire and CNC routed sytrene slats. The Platform roof were 3D printed and lights are LED's.

CAD Design

I knew that the CNC router was not going to be able to effectively work for the station so I begain research in 2020 into buying a laser cutter/engraver. I ended up purchasing an OMTECH 55 Watt CO2 Laser with a 16x24 inch cutting bed. While this may seem like a pricey machine it was well worth the expense and has more than paid for itself.

With the purchase of the laser cutter came a bit of a learning curve on how to design parts to be cut/engraved on the laser. I purchased two other software packages to help with this. Those software's are Lightburn and CorelDraw. CorelDraw is the program I used to draft the CAD model of Union Station. Lightburn is the software that translated the CAD model into commands that operate the laser cutter (also known as Computer aided machining (CAM)). Lightburn is an incredibly powerful program and I could have likely done most of the CAD work in Lightburn without CorelDraw but it would have been a bit more time consuming.

Fabrication

Union Station was fabricated from two types of material. The central portion of the station was made from Acyrlic plastic. These parts were layered togther to form the different brick parts on the model. The wing building were fabricated from MDF which was engraved by the laser. All bricks on the wing buildings have a unique pattern and are made to imitate the sandstone bricks of the real station. Shingles were laser cut from cardstock and glued in place with Superglue. Windows were laser cut from basswood and are composed of 3 seperate layers.

Some components such as the Arches were 3D printed using a Anycubic Photon S 2K resin printer. The arches were model in Solidworks from photos I took of the station from several trips to Denver. Other components such as the window fascades and clock details were also 3D-printed.

Sign Fabrication

Union Station neon sign is iconic and I wanted to have one that lit up. The off-the shelf neon sign wasn't sufficient for this model. I took numerous high resolution photos of the sign. I imported these into CorelDraw and used them to create CAD drawings of each letter. The sign was facibrated in several parts. The red letter covers were laser engraved into red acyrlic sheet stock to hollow out the back to make space for the LED's used to light it up. They were then cut out of the acyrlic sheet stock. A custom set of circuit boards were designed in EAGLE and were fabricated by a circuit manufacturer in China. I poplulated these circuit board with approximatedly 250 LED's. The red letter covers were then glued on top of the circuit boards. The frame that holds the sign was fabricated from brass and phospher bronze wire.

The Main Station

As previously stated the main building was fabricated from laser cut Acrylic. The building was then painted with numerous shades of floquil paint to achieve the look of marble stone.

The Wing Buildings

The wing buildings were fabricated as seperate pieces from MDF and superglued together. The sandstone texture was engraved with the laser cutter. The Roof shingles were laswer cut and painted gray.

The Final Structure

Denver's Union station took 400 hours to draw in CAD, and 250 hours to fabricate. It took me almost a full year to complete this structure. It is fully lit and is approximately 6 ft (2m) in length. The platform is long enought for 7, 80 ft passenger cards. Overall it was a fun structure to scratchbuild and I learned a lot on designing structures for laser cut fabrication.

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