Build the scenery first!
Hey guy's I like the engineering on the middle bridge. Was the engineering from the bridge to the rock formations or from the rock formations to the bridge or could it be since it's in our own little world of make believe could it have been engineered all together. :mrgreen: Looks great.:thumb:
Thanks , as I have often said, bridges create their own focal point. when you run a train over one it is hard not to look at it. I have been doing this for a long time; The Dead Grass, Crooked Creek, & Western has been in business since 1967. Crooked creek has always been a main thematic element with the railroad crisscrossing the creek through five different layout arraignments.
I have made a lot of bridges and learned what works. My primary rule is not to try to build scenery around a bridge. If you can make it work, you will probably have a big clean up job, and it is not worth it. If ypu absoloutely positively must have the bridge in place before the scenery, make it removable, so you can get it out of the way, so that you can mske the best possible scenery under the bridge (remember the focal point thing!) . If the bridge is there, and you are working around it, most likely the secnery will be a little below average under the bridge. If , however you are building the scenery first, before the bridge is built, you can take your time, build really good abutments, and make the ground with rock formations creeks, whatever, and them build the bridge to fit the ground rather than doing it the other way, which usually forces some scenic compromise of some sort.
Trestles are my absolute favorite type of bridge, and building the scenery first is absolutely necessary with a trestle. First of all The bents determine the shape of the ground if you build the bridge first, and that takes incredible skill and or amazing luck to pull off. Also with the cross braced bents, building good scenery underneath them, without missing up the bridge is iether impossible or too much work.
Now as to how that bridge was engineered, I wanted to build a trestle there, as due to scenic conditions at the other two bridges on the Narrow gauge, full trestles there would be very difficult to pull off due to existing topography, or the standard gauge railroad, which must be given priority, as it is the main show.
Now as to how that bridge was engineered, the answer is yes. Now a trestle has to have the bents set at so that there is generally a set distance between the bents. They can be closer together, but they can't be farther apart. The river bottom was already there, in the form of w wide sheet of plywood. The river was too wide at that spot for a mountain stream, so I split the river into two channels , which solved the scenic problem, and gave me an anchor in the middle to support the middle bents, and the sides of the A frame trusses I got by leaning two bents together. A trestle is usually engineered form one end to the other. This one , due to the island in the middle of the streem was engineered from the left to the middle , and from the middle to the right, but also that island was envisioned to support just this kind of happily spindly bridge, which I can get way with as a small consolidation is the largest narrow gauge power owned by anyone in the club.
Bill Nelson