New GWR footbridge
Work has been progressing on the alterations to the station area, with more of the ballasting done. Still some tidying up and painting of rails and sleepers to be done, but it's getting back to where it was before the works begun.
When I originally built the station area, I wanted to use the old Hornby GWR footbridge but I had a lot of trouble finding even a second hand example. I used the Ratio kit as a stand-in, but while it's a nice model, it's (I believe) based on a Southern prototype so never looked entirely at home to my eyes.
Eventually I got hold of a second hand Hornby kit, and now that it's been re-released under the Gaugemaster brand, they should be much easier to find. Last week I made a start on building the kit, but with a few alterations. It needs to be lowered in height, but I also wanted to build mine with one of the staircases facing the other direction. Luckily, once you've started cutting it down, you end up with enough spare bits to make the job pretty straightforward, with some careful cutting and measurement.
Some GWR examples had the area around the legs filled in as storage rooms, and I wanted to include this feature. After trimming the legs to height, plastic card was used to assemble the filled-in bit, using a handful of photos for reference and a large dose of guesswork. The legs should still be visible, so it's not enough just to remove them or sheet over them completely, at least in the examples I've seen. Perhaps it was done differently at some stations, though. Presumably it was a local alteration done according to the individual needs and resources available.
Since the platforms are removable, the bridge has to be as well. I didn't want it just sitting on them, so the solution I came up with was to cut an area of the platform base away around each staircase, and then glue the bridge directly to these. The bridge can be blended into these bases but I don't think the eye picks up on the gap in the platform surface quite as easily as it would the tell-tale line around the base of the bridge, although you can easily see one of the gaps ahead of the lowest step in this picture.
I also added lights to the bridge, but I've yet to wire them and see how they look under darkness. The bridge was painted using Railmatch light and dark stone shades and giving a light wash of weathering, and then the fun bit - adding lots of enamel signs!
As for the old Ratio bridge, it'll be repainted in Southern colours and then hopefully find a use on the layout when I do my long-promised region swap.
Cheers!
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