From my last blog, Dave raised the lack of batter on the foam-board retaining walls and I explained that, because the baseboard is so narrow (300mm), any width dimension is at a premium. About 50mm is taken up by the space needed for the point servos and surface wiring; if the walls sloped then this would increase the space taken between servos and the closest track. The best material to give strength + lightness to the walls is foam-board and that’s another 6mm taken up! So vertical walls with frequent buttresses were always intended.

Before the bridge I needed to prove that my ideas for these walls would, at least look OK, even though a well-informed, critical eye may(?) know different.

Although age is perhaps causing me to move away from my past pedantic views, I’m still pedantic about brick and high quality stone buildings. Mortar seams for high quality stone-work and indeed most real, but rubbish brickwork, are very thin. Likewise such seams are not very deep below the front surface. By the same token, roofing tiles, certainly the slate type are much thinner than we modellers tend to think.

The gable-end of my house does not rate “high quality” but the brick seams are about 8mm thick and 3mm deep at their deepest points. Divide those figures by 76.2 & get 0.1mm & 0.04mm. Can you emboss card or plastic to those dimensions? I certainly can’t! In my view a perfectly flat surface is more correct than embossing for modelling most brick buildings. Blue slate scales at around 0.04mm, or less than 0.002”, and most copy paper is about 0.004”!!! Brick paper for roofs too as far as I’m concerned. Here “brick paper” refers to any printed pattern of masonry on flat paper. Rant over!

I have fond memories of fairly high retaining walls, station buildings, goods sheds, in what I have always known as “engineering blue brick”.

I’ve also read that on occasion, our armed forces were asked to assist in demolition projects and met more resistance than expected; good old railway, blue brick structures!

Wheegram Sidings attempts to copy that blue brick theme and I use ‘Scalescene’s product ~(or is that my product courtesy of Scalescene?).

I include a few shots of the progress with the retaining walls:-

This is taken from the hidden sidings and reasonably shows the buttressing to the wall. The front faces of the buttresses are comfortably within loading gauge. Still work to do but all seems OK. There is some mirror foil in this picture; I may use it as part of a back-scene.

My poor attempt to show some detail of the buttresses.

That's a bit better!

The lift-off bridge has been the main subject of progress since then.

My vague thoughts had been to copy a bridge about a mile east of Guidebridge station, on Astley St. Dukinfield, and adjacent to the GCR carriage works. However when I went to take photographs, the vast number of rivets numbed my brain and I did not even get the camera out of the bag! My brain got into defensive mode saying to me some thing like “This is a totally fictitious railway model so you can do what you want”!

None the less I wanted a steel girder bridge on blue brick support but, assuming a modelling period that allows LNER locos mixed with early BR, a rolled steel version was not OK. What I have ended up with is my own idea of riveted cast iron (steel?) bridge, built fairly late in railway building history. In short I ended up doing what my brain told me; - what I wanted – and I’ve enjoyed it.

I’ll post more complete detail of the bridge next time.

Model well.