Entry posted by jeff_p
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And fill up the gaps in the layout (and that's everywhere at the moment 
).
But, specifically this time, I mean the bridge across the left hand entrance to (exit from) the station. This, with primer just applied, looked like this:
Shiny new paint, though fuzzy as this image was cropped from a larger picture. The arch over the track is the access through the back board of the hills. I had thought to cut it open "to the sky", but a few things stopped me:
- The board with the back scene still needed a hole for the trains the travel through
- The arch would add some strength the relatively small hill is the corner of the board
- There would be a bridge pretty much immediately in front of it, so mostly hidden
To the managements surprise (almost despair) I had no plan to look for something that could be purchased and "made to fit". Scratch building was my chosen way forward. She had a single word reply to that: "How?". Oh dear, I thought 
, best get on with it then.
I chose to take small steps in making the bridge, not because it was difficult, but rather that as this was my first run at building anything for the layout I wanted to leave myself plenty of check points that I could roll back to if I made some ghastly mistake (which I thought quite likely). My starting point then was to make two templates for the front and back of the bridge which captured the curvature of the sides with respect to the rails. Finally one of those cereal boxes I've been saving for a while now found its calling. The result of this is shown here:
These fit nicely across the track and against the side of the cutting. From these templates were made for the two sides of the bridge. These then allowed all of the most awkward pieces of rolling stock to be checked for clearance and to "get a feel" for the general look of the resulting bridge before too much effort was invested into it. These templates looked as follows:
The reference to the rails was maintained to help keep things lined up. The piece in the middle is a combined "arch template" from a Scale Scenes brick paper. None of the arches fitted what I was looking for, so combing pieces of two of them in three bits ("A", "B" then "A" again) gave the curve I was looking for.
Construction of the bridge was pretty simple in reality (fortunately), some 1.5mm artists card was bought form a local Paper/Book/Hobby store (long before the lock down), I think the sheet was A2 size. Two pieces of this made the sides, two pieces of cereal box glues together made the road surface and another made the inside of the arch. Finally two more smaller pieces of the artists card were used to make the walls either side of the road realistically thick. Once the structure was completely dry everything was, very carefully, papered in bricks. As is typical of me, I didn't think to photo the intermediate stages (probably because I had glue on my fingers, so here is the best "in progress" view I have, an internal view:
Finally with the bridge in position, thought not fixed yet (front then back):
You can see how close this is to the back of the layout as the top edge of the plywood arch clips the corner of the last picture.
All in all this didn't take that long to make, which was a good thing, as this is the second one I have made. The first I thought to spray with Matt Varnish to give the printed paper some protection, but successfully managed to make it look like it had been sitting in the sun for years and faded. Too heavy handed with the spray, obviously, so all the prep work at the start of the build paid off. I suspect that I shall be keeping to this style of methodology as while I am happy to learn from my mistakes I hate having to redo more work than necessary as a result.
I suppose the final step should be to glue this in place, but my hand always pulls back at that point. There's no need to make this permanent yet, and while I think this looks pretty good, especially for a first go (reaches round and pats self on the back 
) it's not actually based on any specific bridge or style, I just made it up. There's a good chance I'll try something more accurate in the future.
That's the bridge done, for now. Next the Cambrian GWR 6 Ton Crane, though I am still finishing that off. Here's a peek:
Jeff.
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