This weekend I had a good few hours to do some concentrated work on the layout. The track on the main boards is coming on well and the two points at the right hand end of the loop got finished off. There was nearly a disaster here which took a bit of working around. I had made a small mistake early on with the very first board I built. I had carefully laser cut all the pieces of framing and then assembled them and stuck them to the bottom of the baseboard. Unfortunately I put one piece on the wrong way round resulting in some of the cross framing being 1" further to the right than I had originally intended. You can guess what happened, the frame end up smack bang underneath where the switch blades of one of the points needed to be. No problem I thought. I have the slack to just move the whole formation by 1" to the right and it'll be fine.......

Until I got to the right hand end of the next baseboard and the last point. Aghhhhh! the switch blades end up 5mm from the baseboard edge! A rapid bit of rebuilding of the track by the catch point meant I was able to claw back the missing inch and I've managed to do it without upsetting the geometry too badly. Still I did feel a little stupid. I think the problem really does highlight the major flaw with Templot - you can't print directly onto the baseboards or underlay!

To show it all got back together here is the Class 15 sitting on the mill siding.

I also decided that I had better print out the remaining curve and just satisfy myself that it really will fit into the room without needing an extension! This print out then led me to start thinking about the bridge which gives the title to this blog posting. I want to do a plate girder bridge rather like the ones that used to cross various drains in the fens. The lines in East Anglia were built by several companies who weren't exactly rich and G.E.R. inherited lots of timber trestles which were falling apart. Even then they didn't go in for expensive iron work and many of the bridges I have photographs of look decidedly 'skinny'. As I'm not sure I have the life-force left to take to mass riveting of scratch-built bridge sides I thought I'd try and fabricate something using Wills Vari-girders which I had left over from Empire Basin to see how they would look.

The bridge is double track and has 4 spans, the two central spans across the main river are just over 50' and the two at the sides about 25'. For the short spans I've tried cutting the vari-girders in half and then reinstating the rivets in plasticard on the bottom edge. For the larger spans I thought I'd also try to curve the end of the girder (I've only done one end for now) because that seemed to match the photographs I have.

I've sat the J65 and its train at the correct rail height.

So I'd appreciate your views on whether you think this will work. The actual water level in the river will probably be about 10mm off the base board level (cut in clear perspex. I want to try and at least get the base of the bridge cut before Christmas so I complete the circuit again and drive trains round and round!

David