Sunday, April 13, 2014

Scratchbuilding a wooden bridge

Steinlehof is surrounded by tracks north of Emsingen, so it obviously needs some way to for access. When I built the area I planned for a one-lane road that comes out of the woods along the back drop, crosses the track and proceeds to Steinlehof. The only catch is the very substantial elevation change between the backdrop forest and the Steinlehof area. I partially addressed this a couple years ago.

Which leaves us with the bridge. There's no way I could find a ready-made model that would fit this location, so the only way out was scratch building. I decided to aim for a somewhat modern wooden bridge on a steel span, since that would be the most likely construction method given location and the very light traffic. It took me a while to find an appropriate prototype construction, and eventually settled on a design I saw near Zurich.



I liked the very basic construction of this bridge.
Last night I set out to replicate the look. Here are 's the result with boards cut and loosely set in place.

Steinlehofbruecke as seen from Talheim operator position

Bird's eye view

View from the track in the cut
As can be seen in the photos instead of steel beams, I used heavy timbers for support. I will add a forth beam in final construction and of course need to stain the wood.
One problem is that the supports on each side are not perfectly level. Nevertheless, I think I'll build the bridge deck at the bench. Since the entire bridge is not level due to the elevenation change, I will need to build the handrails in place to get vertical supports at the right angle.
Additional angled beams supporting the bridge deck from underneath will need to be fitted in, too.

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