Playing Bridge

Lately I have not had the time or the energy to withstand the heat to work on the layout. This past week has been great though. It has actually felt like Fall here in Southern California. But for some strange reason Mother Nature is playing games with us again. It going to be back in the mid 90's this upcoming week. I hate the heat!

Yesterday I actually was able to work on something for a short period while Jim Bob, my 21 month (the wife hates when I call him that. His name is James Robert so what can I say) was down for a nap.

I am still killing myself over the trackwork and building the turnouts so I decided to skip all that and work on a bit of scenery. I picked the location that will have the most scenery and the least of track. This area will be in between two bridges: Hwy I-90 Frontage Rd/Gallatin St. Bridge and the I-90 fwy overpass. I mainly worked on getting the Frontage Rd. Bridge to fit into place.

Here is a shot of the actual bridge:

(Photo by Tom Danneman)

I am using the same material as I did for my backdrop for the streets. I like the flexability that it brings. Under the bridge you can see that I took foam poster board that I had laying around to create the under frame of the bridge. I stacked on two layers.

To create the arch in the bridge I bent the wood and form boards and glued with a hot glue gun. This made the setting period go quickly. Once I have everything set in place then I will set the bridge and then add some plaster scenery to fill in the gaps around the road. The arch might seem a little too extreme but I asure you that it will be fine once everything is set and in place with scenery around it. Unlike the prototype where the street levels out at the top, my bridge has to pretty much slope back down towards the town of Logan.

You can see that I have enough clearance for a double stack car to go under. As most of you know double stacks never travel this line but I still wanted it to have enough clearance just incase I needed it to be. I also check to make sure that the posts of the bridge were not too close to the track in case I had to run a passenger car or auto wrack through there. So far everything is good.

The bridge will be finished off with some styrene strips along the underside frame to hide the foam board and some guard rails on the top either made by styrene also or wood. We'll see.