Inspiration is a wonderful tonic! Progressing well now as modifying the bridge sides is a relatively easy task. The four outside plates are complete with the inner plates cut in half and glued. The end plates that are directly under the stonework abutments were cut from the original end pieces and end riveted detail cut from the same now spare panels.
This is because the plates were turned through 90° to create the right number and spacing for replicating the bridge.

Going from the photos, you can only just make out these inner panels due to the level of track ballast filling across the girder plate bridge. So why use full panels when they could come in handy for another project. This also helps the fitting of the plates to the plywood base to the abutments on the raised embankment.
The bottom splice plates were similarly fabricated from 0.75 x 4.8mm evergreen styrene strip along with the 0.75 x 4.0mm/1.5 x 3.2mm bridge side access walkway timbers that will have safety rails added later on. The 1.5 x 3.2mm was perfect for the walkway curved steel braces that are attached by the 2.0 x 2.0mm angles to the plate girder joints.
The photographic detail shows that the curved braces have a ‘T’ through section, but after a couple of hours unsuccessfully trying various methods to curve a flat 0.25 x 1.5mm styrene strip on edge I had to concede defeat! If someone has a method short of cutting out of a flat sheet to achieve this detail in OO scale, I’d be glad to hear about it.

The Long Drag to Garsdale – Coal Road SAC Bridge 115 pt3a. Deconstruct & Do it Again

Well now I did it wrong it turned out, everything looked right until the plate girder width was checked against my drawing. The drawing width = 19mm as opposed to 22mm kit size. So I went AWOL and played trains for a while.
I decided to carefully slice the width by 5mm and add the bottom 2mm rivet detail back on.
So here’s the result so far.