Working on the Siskiyou Line again ...
Here's a photo of the Sutherlin area as it looks as of this writing (click to enlarge):
The area of focus at the moment is on the far left of this photo between Sutherlin and Oakland. On the prototype, there's a short deck girder span across a country road. I'm modeling this span as faithfully as I can. Here's a photo of the prototype bridge:
My family lived about a quarter mile from this location when I was growing up, so I'm very familiar with this bridge. I would walk down to it often and play near it as a grade school kid or as a young teen.
I've also visited my folks with my family after I got married, and my wife and my kids would often walk down to "the bridge" as a fun outing and I'd talk about my childhood. The family loved those walks, so this particular bridge has a lot of pleasant memories for me.
Notice the prototype bridge has two huge concrete abutments, with one side squared off and the other side with a wing, and each abutment is a mirror image of the other.
This bridge has no bridge shoes, the steel girders just sit straight on the abutment lip.
The country road climbs up a short hill, goes under the girder bridge, and then climbs and curves off to the right to meet another road dropping downgrade in a wye junction behind the abutment on the right.
I intend to model the roads as shown here, and to model the terrain contours as faithfully as I can. Additionally I want to weather the abutment rust flows just as they look on the prototype, and want to add all the small details like the ladder under the bridge leaning up against the abutment on the right side.
Just like the prototype, my bridge is on a curve. The only difference is my curve is opposite to the prototype, but the effect is very similar. Here's a shot of my model of this bridge taken from about the same angle as the prototype bridge in the photo above.
From this photo you can see how I've tried to model the abutments as accurately as possible. My spline roadbed is quite a bit higher than the point where the road will be when it drops downgrade from the bridge toward the fascia. Here's a shot from farther back so you can see how this area looks from the eye level view of an operator standing in the aisle.
The road will climb upgrade from the fascia, curve under the bridge, and then just beyond the abutment on the right will meet up with another road curving around to the right beyond the track. I'm going to use green florist's foam to build up the contours in this scene because it will give me a lot of control - more control than cardboard strips and masking tape, which is my usual method (you can see some of that tape and cardboard strips scenery off to the left of the bridge where the slight rise is between the fascia and the track).
As a side note, you can see I built my upper deck benchwork at this end of the room right in front of the windows, and you can see daylight streaming through the holes in the benchwork. Once all the scenery is in and the layout black drop cloths are in place, you'll never see all this daylight.
This is a MicroEngineering 30' deck girder bridge, with abutments scratchbuilt out of 60 thousandth's styrene, and then abused with a file to roughen up the styrene to add weathering and form seams like are visible on the prototype. I added layered shims underneath the bridge using stacked 1x2s and then "micro-shimmed" the abutments to the correct height using different thicknesses of stripwood. I glued all the shims in place using white glue, and then glued the styrene abutments to the shims with flexible super glue.
If you've never heard of flexible super glue, it has some rubbery compounds in it so the joint is flexible instead of brittle like a normal super glue joint is. I love the flexible super glue a lot - you can get it in various thicknesses and for model railroading use, I think the flexibility makes the joints more durable and able to withstand some abuse. I use two thicknesses - here's some links to it on Amazon, the thicker kind, and t he thinner kind.
I also did some special things to get the track alignment I wanted across this bridge and the approaches. Here's a closeup photo from above so you can follow what I'm talking about:
I removed the flex track over the abutments and bent some code 83 rail to match the exact curve over the bridge, so it flows smoothly into the flex track curves without kinks. I used most of the MicroEngineering plastic bridge ties but I cut off the spike heads with a sharp Xacto knife because they won't work for curved rail, only straight rails. I replaced five of the plastic ties with matching dimension basswood ties so I could spike the rail in place over the bridge.
I take small MicroEngineering spikes and cut off two-thirds of their length using flush cutters. I cut the spikes at an angle, so they still have a point on them and can be pushed into the basswood. Here's a photo of the process:
That's the progress here so far. It's great to be working on the layout again, and I plan to keep reporting on the progress here in my MRH blog as this scene develops and as the layout gets more done on it as we march toward August!
