I've spent a few evenings beginning to add the road overbridge at the northern end of the summer module. The pictures in Iain Rice's book on using the Wills materials proved very useful, as did a trawl of the internet - I had my doubts about a structure of this type spanning more than two tracks but soon found that it wasn't unheard of.

The construction is nothing fancy. I had some girder bridges salvaged from my old layout Wyvant, but these were all unfortunately slightly too short for the situation here, so they went back in the scrap box. In the end I did what I'd already done on Paynestown, which is use the Wills vari-girder components. The bridge here would require more than one pack, but I had some spares bits left over from Paynestown which did the job. I still have a lot of detail to add in terms the supporting stonework, abutments etc but have run out of the relevant sheets for now.

Looking up to the underside of the bridge. As with Paynestown, I felt it was worth adding some suggestion of the lateral beams spanning the gap between the girders (and supporting the roadbed) although they're not really visible in this shot. To get an impression of the beams, I needed some corrugated material. Since I didn't have anything at hand, I used a trick I'd seen on a model railroading DVD (for forming ploughed fields) which was to soak open the structure of a cardboard box, exposing the internal corrugations. If you do this carefully you can get really nice clean corrugations which when painted will look the part, or a lot better than nothing at all. In fact I didn't even bother painting these since the raw brown looked plausibly rusty to my eyes.

Finally, the culvert under the tracks was built using the very simple Wills kit. I constructed it as a unit, adding several inches of false lining to the tunnel so that there's something to see when you look into it. As is hopefully obvious, neither the bridge nor the culvert are at right angles to the tracks, but are both slightly skewed which I think gives a more interesting and lifelike arrangement.

Still lots of work to do in building up the landforms, etc, but we're getting there and it's nice to see some scenery, albeit of a rudimentary kind, begin to take shape on this module.

Cheers, and thanks for reading.