Make a Diamond Railway Station Sign in SCARM

Have you seen the Railway Station Signs in UK and India?  It is formed by a Blue Stripe bisecting a Red Circle on a White Diamond – diamond like the Ace of Diamonds in a pack of cards.  When I started to plot the train stations as a part of Chennai 3D, it decided to mark the spots with such a free standing board-sign.

And immediately ran into problems in SCARM (Simple Computer Aided Railway Modeller).  The software has 4 basic figures in a rectangle, a polygon, a vertical cylinder and a horizontal cylinder, and an additional Roof figure.  It does not have a Diamond.

Though a diamond is nothing but a square titled 90 degrees, there are no options in SCARM to rotate-tilt the Square in the fore-and-aft or forward and back direction – that is rotate it on the X axis (or the Y axis for that matter).  The current rotate function moves the rectangle or any other object only in a athwart or left and right direction.  Thus at first glance, it seems to be an impossible task with SCARM 0.9.25.

But I style myself ‘mad’, and is known as an unconventional, outside-the-box problem solver for nothing.  Thinking a problem through, with the objective always in sight, while aware of the possibilities, and minding the restrictions is the way to find solutions, and the way I work.

Shameless self-promotion apart, the solution came out in a few minutes.  A diamond is nothing but a normal (isosceles) triangle sitting on top of another inverted (isosceles) triangle.  The next hindrance was there is no Triangle figure in SCARM 0.9.25.  A few more minutes offered the next step in the solution – hacking or modifying the inbuilt Gable Roof figure.

Here is the snapshot of the Railway Station Signboard and its ‘unassembled’ view.  As you can see, there is

• a black rectangle forming the post,
• a normal triangle or modified gable roof forming the upper part of the diamond;
• an inverted triangle forming the lower part of the diamond;
• a red circle or horizontal cylinder with a white one nesting within;
• and a blue rectangle forming the stripe.

While the other parts are self explanatory, here is a short description of how I formed the triangles by modifying the Gable Roof in SCARM.
On the SCARM 0.9.25:

• draw & select a rectangle along the X axis;
• select ‘gable roof’ from figures for the rectangle;
• change the colour to White;
• rotate the roof by 90 degrees (because the ridge of the gable is formed along X axis, while we want it along Y axis);
• set the base height (vertical position) and height in the properties pop-up;
• you can delete the original rectangle, the roofs will remain;
• save it as test.scarm.

Now open up the test.scarm file with a text editor – my poison is Notepad++

• locate the TFigRoofs and adjust the width or thickness of the triangles (and the circles and stripe later);
• adjust other parameters if and as required.

Here is the snapshot of the scarm file with the parameters explained (as I understand them).



Go back to SCARM, assemble them together, Group them, and – Viola, there is the Railway Signboard made in SCARM.  The Top Triangle is adjusted to be a little longer than the Bottom inverted Triangle to hide the ‘eaves’.

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