Minecraft: Hollowing out a Train Station

At the end of last post, I’d figured out where my first stretch of track was going to be, and where my first two stations would be: a large one inside my home hill, and a small one near my new house. So now it was time to start work on one of those; I decided to tackle my home hill.

Miranda decided to help me design, so first we walked around the top of the hill a lot figuring out where things should go. Eventually, we noticed that the track location went in a line that connected a tower on top of the hill with a tree on top of the hill. That seemed to be too much of a coincidence to pass up, so we decided to go with that. After looking at pictures of train stations, we decided go go with a window at the top window of the roof, along with further windows down the sides.

A sunrise we saw while looking out the side of the hill

Leveling off the top of the roof

The skylight is in place

A view of the tracks from the roof

The tower, which we widened to match the skylight

After that, we had to figure out what to do with the sides. We decided to put windows and dirt in rows on the sides; also, the east side of the hill was quite a bit steeper than the west side, so we ended up building up the east side more. Once we had the windows in place, we went back up to the top and started hollowing out the inside.

Adding more windows on the west side of the hill

Extending the east side of the hill

Starting to hollow out the middle

Sunrise through the windows

Hollowing it out wasn’t too tedious at first, because it was narrower at the top and because it was dirt instead of stone. As we got further down, it started to drag on a bit; fortunately, however, the space started to look pretty amazing as it got taller, so the effort was worth it.

Space is starting to form inside

Lots of blocks bouncing around

It's getting taller

Now it's really tall

By this point, we were getting close to the track level, so it was time to figure out exactly how the sides would look where they met the ground. (Which was actually a few blocks above track level, because of the hill that we were on.) Eventually we decided to add vertical sides with double-height windows; they were in slightly different positions on the two sides, because of the different configurations of the land.

The windows on the east side

Looking through the station

And now we’re done hollowing out that part. And it looks great! Except that it’s clearly too short in comparison to its width: we’ll have to extend it further in to the hill, and possible also further out the sand dunes; I guess I’ll work on that next weekend. That will require some amount of fiddling with the shape of the hill, but now that I’ve gotten past my need to leave natural features exactly as they are, I think that will probably improve the look of the hill: in particular, the east side was way too steep before.

An inside view of the full height

The west side of the station

The east side of the station

And, of course, we have to furnish the station. Not least, laying at least one set of tracks! (There’s probably room in the station for around ten sets of tracks, it’s something like 26 squares wide.) I think I’ll put half-height blocks on the ground, to provide a raised bed above the tracks. Also, I’m not sure about the lighting: Miranda was lobbying for having minimal torches, but I’m not convinced that’s the way to go, so I may end up climbing way up the walls to add more torches. And we’ll want some sort of big window high up in the front of the station, once we figure out where the front of the station actually is.

A good day’s work, I’m glad to see this finally taking shape.

Watching the sun set through the station