How to Make OO Scale Corrugated Roofing

Corrugated sheeting is a common material on railway buildings, particularly in the late steam era, but how can you make it?

Nissan huts, station subway stair covers, factory roofing, goods sheds. The list goes on.

If you’re making buildings for your railway you’ll need corrugated roofing at some point.

Wills, and others sell good representations of it for OO scale but if you prefer to scratch build your own here’s a quick and easy technique I’ve been using recently.

Nip down to your local arts and crafts store and take a look in the cake decorating aisle.  Find the cake pillars, like the one seen below.

The top and bottom don’t matter, it’s the middle section with the parallel ridges and grooves we’re after.

Finding the ones where these grooves are to scale can be difficult.

In my case, I took an OO gauge figure with me and surreptitiously held him against the ridges.

I’d previously compared looked at some corrugated roofing and found ridges tended to be about a hand length so I looked for cake pillars with ridges that were the size of the hands for my diminutive my OO figure.

Being an arts and crafts shop, the assistants will hopefully be understanding should you get caught!

While you’re out, nip over to the supermarket and pick up some tin foil cooking trays. The sort ready-meals come in.

These are the ideal thickness. Normal tin foil is too thin and won’t hold the impressions.

Cut out sections of these to the sizes for the roofing sheets you require and wrap them around the cake pillar; taping it to hold it firmly against the pattern.

Now with a round tip tool or fingernail, press the tin-foil into the grooves.

This gives you the corrugated pattern in the tin-foil.

With this made, it’s just a case of painting it to the desired colours wanted.

I use acrylic greys to start and then add rust and weathering paints to finish it off.

That’s it.

Let the paints dry and then put them on whatever building you’re modelling.

> A final, personal, note: I spend a huge amount of time testing, photographing, writing and researching techniques for these articles and pay for all the running costs of MRE out of my own pocket. If you found this article useful you can support me by making a donation on my fund-raising page. Thanks and happy modelling, Andy.