Hi all,

I have built for my current layout a 3-span plate girder bridge (2 x 50' and 1x30' center span). It is loosely based on ATSF prototypes for wooden deck (with ballasted track) plate girder bridges. It is almost finished from a modeling perspective (no ballast yet) and has been temporarily installed in the layout in order to serve its purpose.

The bridge's core is made with two 2mm thick styrene plates that enclose several styrene square tubes which in turn have been reinforced internally with brass tubes (4-5mm diameter). The deck is also made of 2mm styrene. Building it like this ensured that there is no flexing of the bridge even with the heaviest of consists passing over it, without the structural need of the actual steel trestle tower on the center span (micro engineering, has not been installed yet).

Cosmetically the deck has been dressed with Vollmer wooden-plank-pattern styrene sheets in some parts, while the plate girders are made using Wills' vari-girder components. Pillars, braces and cross braces for the railings are made from square tubing of various sizes whereas the railing itself is made of styrene channels. The latter did warp nicely along its length to represent the warping on the prototype's wooden railing. All plain-styrene elements were treated with a steel wire brush in order to recreate the effect of wooden surfaces. Painting was done by airbrushing acrylics. Weathering has been done in various layers using acrylic rust effects/colors (MIG) and weathering enamels (again MIG), using either brush, drybrush, washes, filters and/or airbrushing.

I hope you like it and thanks in advance for your time in reading this. The final photo is a plate for the second lower bridge that you can see in the photographs, made using similar techniques and it gives you a clearer-closeup picture of the weathering.

Yannis

Photos follow ...

Moderator note: Yannis, because of a "feature" of these forums, it's best not to make your opening post very long, and instead also add an initial comment after the first post with all the juicey details. That's because this forum software REPEATS the opening post across all pages of the thread. If your opening post is very long, then people have scroll down through it to get to the new comments on page 2 and beyond, and a really long opening post makes that something of a pain. So we moved all your great photos to the first comment AFTER your opening post.