Another Roof Question

There is no shortage of "barrel tile" roofs out here in the Western US, as well. *Somewhere* I recently saw a thread about an O scale Spanish styled depot (A,T,&S.F. I think) a guy scratch built and used plastic drinking straws cut to tile length and then sliced in half, which were then applied to the roof the same way the real ones are, i.e. alternating between one up and one downward tile that drain into the next course. The whole thing was painted red afterwards. Looked spot-on perfect compared to old school hand made tile. Modern cement tile has both the up and down tiles molded into one tile, along with other overlapping patterns. If you have the patience, I think this method would work fine, I am considering trying this myself. If you give this method a try, please post pictures!

Thanks, it is a great idea and while a bit tedious would work out well, I think.  I've seen articles/posts something about the method in the past, and since I want to build a model of an ATSF southwest US station, kept it in mind.  It's not on my list of projects to do real soon though, so if you go ahead and do it please post pictures. 

Thank you for your response. It is a real good idea.

# PLA-91637 by PLASTRUCT Scale Plastic Pattern Sheet - O (1:48) SPANISH TILE SHEET

The molded sheet stuff is ok, but looks better in the smaller scales IMO. That would definitely be the quick and easy way to go though. I am doing some roofs myself today. You can see the pile-o-corrugated metal that has recently "arrived". That is going on the fresh looking building and the red one is getting weathered "tarpaper" : Strips of shoebox tissue soaked in diluted Elmers and applied like papier-mache', then painted black and weathered with some desert dust.  Also in these (horrible) pics you can see the stovepipes ready to be installed. I'll give you one guess as to what those stovepipes are made out of..

OK, times up- here is the spoiler for the stovepipe material. In this pic you can see my corrugated "factory", too. The raw material is cheap, and getting more goes real well with the production process of clamping the dies together against the workbench with an I-beam clamp.

I have been tinkering with making a variety of scenic details lately, you can see some crates, a side-o-beef, and some sacks. The beef is Bondo (with a red wash) in an instamold pulled off of a Pegasus cow and the sacks are made from Salt Dough, a trick I learned back in my Military Modeling days for making sandbags.

I have posted several 'how I recently scratch built a number of buildings' on my web site with narrative and photos. check it out on the scenery source list on the OGR Forum under the name Westport Model Works.

Les Lewis

I used the molded sheet stuff as the roof on my cathedral: I can't imagine doing its nearly three-square feet of roof any other way, and the closest a viewer can possibly get is perhaps four feet, so you can't as easy see it is the sheet stuff.  

There are press and stick shingle and scale corrugated roof from Builders In Scale.  and BTS.  
BTS shingles and Builders in scale  corrugated roofing.