Scratch Built Bridge?

Yes,

This bridge is 48" long. The internal structure is pine 2" x 8". There is 1/2" plywood at each end and the base. Arches are formed out of Masonite. The surface is hydrocal molded with silicone "Arch" and "Abutment Wall" pieces. The base color is gray latex.  

This sort of took on a life of it's own. FWIW, I used 5 rail stainless GarGraves. We have never experienced a derailment on this bridge. 

Photo shows my scratch-built truss bridge on my under-construction layout in 2016. Twenty-four inches in length made from basswood.

MELGAR

Picture of 3 bridges I built for a club layout some years ago.  Still have two of them, and others.  They are built out of suspended ceiling support strut materials and underground conduit "chairs".   I was an iron worker in prior years when first started in construction, and the suspended ceiling struts worked very much the same as I beams and angle iron, so to construct a bridge was easy.  I used rivets and steel perforated sheet to connect the sections.  Not exactly prototypical, but they work and are strong enough that I tested by standing on them.  Wanted to be certain a heavy, and expensive, Big Boy didn't  wind up down on the hard floor from several feet up.

Jesse   TCA  12-68275

Chris:

I routinely build with Wenge.  All I do is spray it with clear Tung Oil (or eqiv). I have a table saw so I am able to cut dadoes in the bottom chords to align and glue ties. A fixture helps here to keep the chords on all bridges the same width.

Joe

Mike CT posted:

Deck bridge using MTH graduated trestles and poplar cut to look like an I Beam.  

MIKE CT,

Beautiful combination of smooth curves and smooth track elevation. I admire your work whenever I see it posted.

MELGAR

Chris,

i have done a number of them. Stop buy and I will give you any help that you need.

First, Thanks to all who responded. Looks like we have some real talent here!

Joe, your work looks closest to what I have in mind. Those spans look about 3-4 ft long, correct? I like your idea of a fixture or jig to keep things straight. That makes a whole lot of sense to me. What do you use the fasten everything together? Glue? Screws? Pins? I have a shorter (24") wood through truss bridge that someone gave me years ago. That one has pins and brass rods. A nice work of art.

Al, Thanks for your offer of help. Are you going to York this spring?

Chris

LVHR

Mine is 30" long, 9" in height. Just finished up gluing one, building a 2nd, much wider one. Built from the leftover plywood strips I cut for my fencing. Another project trying to complete.What's best choice of paint for a weatherd look?

Used an N scale bridge as a template. Printed to paper so all sides pieces were the same. Just finished expansion to run other rooms of house.

About half way on the bigger bridge.

Hi Chris,

I built a "concrete" arch under bridge using particle board (for the concrete texture) with a pine 1 X 4 for the deck. The vertical strips are more particle board beveled at the tops and grooved with a table saw to give it interest. The area between the strips that looks like it is routed out is  just a masonite overlay. I used a piece of wood molding at the top along the entire deck. A small engraving at the top of the arch reads 1998 reminding me when the layout was nearing completion. The bridge was inspired by Clark Dunham's layouts.

The open deck bridge below it is an older Miami Valley redwood kit.

TJ

In the midst of building a too large RR too late in life I simply do not have enough time left on this side of the turf to do anything in detail.  There are several valleys that needed crossing so I copped out and used 30" to 90" plywood arch bridges.  They are either painted or will have faux masonry paper applied.

Due to box beam construction they are very strong.  No deflection with 12" cinder blocks placed on them.  The 7 1/2'  gorge was to have two stretched out bridges but the road crew got carried away and ran two additional tracks over the first pair.  Pure fantasy. One of the bridge tracks had an unusual blackened single center located guard rail.  The valley looks more like a 1955 department store train display.

Six of the bridges are fixed and five of them are equipped with circuit interrupters to lift out for egress or sump pump access. 

Highway bridges that inspired my design:

 There are now two scratch built bridge threads running simultaneously. Can they be combined?

lehighline posted:

First, Thanks to all who responded. Looks like we have some real talent here!

Joe, your work looks closest to what I have in mind. Those spans look about 3-4 ft long, correct? I like your idea of a fixture or jig to keep things straight. That makes a whole lot of sense to me. What do you use the fasten everything together? Glue? Screws? Pins? I have a shorter (24") wood through truss bridge that someone gave me years ago. That one has pins and brass rods. A nice work of art.

Al, Thanks for your offer of help. Are you going to York this spring?

 

Chris

LVHR

Chris:

I have built from 24 -48 inches. 48 is about the limit for one piece of wenge w/o warping. The entire structure is built with yellow wood glue. You can always drill for brass rods but with my updated design  the glue is more than enough.

Attached are some designs that will help along with your visit to Alan

Tonkanut, tj,  Any possibly for additional layout shots?  Nicely done.

TJ,

Nicely done! That scene looks Frank Ellison worthy!  

Chris

LVHR

Tom Tee posted:

Tonkanut, tj,  Any possibly for additional layout shots?  Nicely done.

lehighline posted:

TJ,

Nicely done! That scene looks Frank Ellison worthy!  

 

Chris

LVHR

Thanks Tom and Chris, I appreciate it!

I have attached some of my favorite pix below and was featured in the OGR magazine Run 250 June/July 2011, OGR's Video Great Layout Adventures Volume7  from 2011 and TM Books and Video Toy Train Revue 3  from 2014.

If you're not bored yet I have several YouTube videos you can see by searching for "TJ's Trains" including my special effects and a recent postwar layout.

Here is a link to a fun short video which features Rich Melvin and Jim Barrett when they did their video shoot of my layout in 2011.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwupYJoWZbo&t=51s

TJ

A few I have made in the past along with the help of my son Mark.

I've done a couple. Basically, theres a wood support structure inside with plywood skins on the sides and trim pieces on the superstructure. Not hard to do. We also have a couple of trestles that were much more involved in their construction. The first one is a basic concrete arch bridge modeled after the York Blvd. bridge over the Pasadena Freeway near Los Angeles.

This was connected to a "stretched arch" bridge by a viaduct. The bents on the viaduct are 1x3 wood cores with 1/4" plywood facings and mouldings for the sides. The track support is HDPE lumber in a "ladder" style sub-roadbed which was bent to shape during assembly. Then girders were attached between the bents.

The lower trestle was scratch built "upside down" -- i.e., we set the stringers at the right height and curvature, then installed the bents which were made in a jig and shimmed up. Scenery was put over the bases. This trestle is a 48" radius (O-96) curve approximately 2 feet tall and has over 1,500 nut/bolt/washer castings installed on the cross braces (a lot of pin-vise/drill work). It took the two members in charge of the project about 18 months to complete the bridge, though we could run trains across it much sooner.

The upper trestle deck (plywood) was set in place and the bents constructed from steel angle, wood and styrene. The bridge girders are resin castings we made (same ones used on the viaduct at the other end of the building). We still haven't gotten around to ballasting the deck.

Nice craftsmanship Matt.

Very nice work Matt.

Chris,

i am not going out to York this year. I could not go if I wanted to this year since I came down with the flu.

Don,

I love the detail underneath. Can you tell us a little more about it? 

Chris

LVHR

lehighline posted:

Don,

I love the detail underneath. Can you tell us a little more about it? 

Chris

LVHR

Chris,

I have an out door shelf layout under a covered patio attached to my workshop, and overlooking our backyard pond. I needed a bridge to span the door opening to the shop, and a series of trestles along the pond end of the patio, which is about an 8 foot span after the curves. It is two loops of Atlas track, and the dimensions are about 10 feet by 16 feet. The open deck girder bridge is made of steel and is hand soldered. I modeled my bridge from a span not far from home. The rivets are hand punched using a masonry nail and hammer. I didn't do as many rivets as are on the prototype, as I would have spent double the amount of time it took for the ones I did! I work in the maintenance dept of our local school district, and have access to all the metal working tools and equipment. The build took about a month of spare time labor. I do have photos of the build if you are interested.

Don

I scratch built my Trolley Bridge with Polystyrene for the steel arch and rails and precision board for the bridge supports.  Polystyrene makes great looking steel and it holds a lot of weight. I buy my Polystyrene from a plastic supply house in 3'X7' sheets, the small piece's are Strip styrene by Evergreen.

gene maag posted:

I scratch built my Trolley Bridge with Polystyrene for the steel arch and rails and precision board for the bridge supports.  Polystyrene makes great looking steel and it holds a lot of weight. I buy my Polystyrene from a plastic supply house in 3'X7' sheets, the small piece's are Strip styrene by Evergreen.

 

Nice work Gene!

Older thread, I know, but I'm showing off my bridge anyway.   My son and I built this in 2015 from popsicle sticks from pictures on the iPad.  Naturally, it's our version of the Golden Gate and its 6.5 ft long and the towers are 2 feet tall.   It was a 2 month summer project just for fun.

HP 289,

I’m impressed!  That’s a great father/son project.

John

Wow! Thanks for sharing. Very nice work. I bet that was nice project to do with your son.

Jim K

@Hp289 posted:

Older thread, I know, but I'm showing off my bridge anyway.   My son and I built this in 2015 from popsicle sticks from pictures on the iPad.  Naturally, it's our version of the Golden Gate and its 6.5 ft long and the towers are 2 feet tall.   It was a 2 month summer project just for fun.

Great job! Did this become part of a layout?

Thanks gents, It was a great project.  We brought up a pic on the iPad and built it strictly from pictures and some thought provoking engineering.  Not putting it on the layout, it's going to to stay on the shelf.

@Hp289 posted:

As one bridge troll to another, that is one GREAT build. Tanks for posting.

Question

Has anyone used really  small nails or pins to hold small pieces of wood together?  I’ve seen the finished results but don’t know about the tooling or how to use. I have a bridge project coming up. Thanks

Built this 'PostWar" style bridge for my previous garage layout back in 2012 and have used it as a display piece since. 2X6 end piers and the rest is bass wood I stripped on a table saw.

I did a truss bridge for a friend's HO layout way back...most likely sometime in the early 1990's as MTH and Weaver were just getting into the swing of six-axle road diesels at the time). It was made of craft sticks. Y' know, like popsicle sticks. I only wish I knew where the sole photos of it I took are, but they were taken before I got my first digital camera so it's anyone's guess where the prints are. I took a couple of hours to hack together a digital drawing of how it looked:

How I designed it is still fresh in my mind (save for the exact makeup of the splice plates as they were fabricated from parallel craft sticks). How to make a 3' or so bridge out of what are essentially popsicle sticks? Make I-beams out of them. I sawed off the rounded ends of many sticks to square them off, then assembled them into I-beams, which were then joined end-to end with 1" bits of stick glued across the web of said girders as splice plates on both sides. Each of these joints were further reinforced by drilling and inserting common stick pins through them, securing them against movement with glue,then clipping off the excess.  Once I had two of these beams of the requesite length I moved on to the actual deck.

Since this was for HO scale. I fabricated crossbeams of the same sawed-off sticks, butted perpendicular to the side I-beams, I didn't cap these with flanges, but had I been doing this for O-scale, I definitely would have. Running from crossbeam to crossbeam were stringers cut to fit each span and spaced to lie under the HO rails. Now the deck looked something like a ladder inside a wider ladder. For bracing I cut additional sticks with 45-degree angles to atttach to the underside of the ladder, turning it into a truss. With the decking done, I turned to the superstructure.

The superstructure was as one would expect for a curved upper chord. All structural members here were built up of the same squared-off craft sticks asembled into I-beams, laid out on their sides with the vertical beams oriented with the web facing the ends of the structure and the flanges parallel, extending reaching a little more than a half-inch farther in order to join the flanges of both top and bottom I-beams. All splice plates in the superstructure were also drilled and pinned, although as mentioned above, I'm not certain of exactly how I arranged them.

So how strong was it? I didn't have any HO locomotives to place within it, (the bridge certainly dwarfs them) but with the completed structure supported by VHS cassette cases at each end. I sat three O-gauge diesels atop it, a MTH Dash 8 and C30-7, and a Weaver SD40-2. About 15 pounds of locomotives, and there was no measurable deflection in the deck. The bridge also survived falling about four feet when one of the free-standing tables it spanned was accidentally bumped. One of the superstructure beams broke loose from the end of the deck owing to the lack of splice plates there--I took the bridge home and added them as pictured. I'm pretty sure if I were building a similar-length structure out of the same materials today for O scale, I could build it strong enough to safely carry a scale Big Boy or Allegheny.

@train steve posted:

Question

Has anyone used really  small nails or pins to hold small pieces of wood together?  I’ve seen the finished results but don’t know about the tooling or how to use. I have a bridge project coming up. Thanks

I used notches, tiny finish nails and glue when I made my wood bridges. The bridges are outdoors, although they are not in direct contact with the elements, as the shelf layout is under a covered patio. I used oak, so the holes were pre-drilled, (photo 1). Photo 2 shows a nail attaching a cross beam to a post.

Two bridge designs, both made from 1/4" pine, ripped to 1/4" and 1/2" wide. drew full size on brown craft paper, then cut pieces to fit and connected them with wood glue. Bridges are very sturdy, as the original design would be when scaled up.  I painted black then weathered with a white wash.

This method allows you to create a bridge to exactly fit the space you have available. I started with scale dimensions, then compressed slightly to improve the look. Got the designs from a Bridge Building book. the lower bridge is the Canadian Pacific Stoney Creek bridge, the upper is a traditional truss bridge.

@Joe K posted:

Two bridge designs, both made from 1/4" pine, ripped to 1/4" and 1/2" wide. drew full size on brown craft paper, then cut pieces to fit and connected them with wood glue. Bridges are very sturdy, as the original design would be when scaled up.  I painted black then weathered with a white wash.

This method allows you to create a bridge to exactly fit the space you have available. I started with scale dimensions, then compressed slightly to improve the look. Got the designs from a Bridge Building book. the lower bridge is the Canadian Pacific Stoney Creek bridge, the upper is a traditional truss bridge.

Nice work.

Here is a foam bridge I made a few years ago.  I still haven't added the railing.  As others have stated above, it is very strong.

@David Minarik posted:

Here is a foam bridge I made a few years ago.  I still haven't added the railing.  As others have stated above, it is very strong.

Is it on the layout yet? That looks good. It looks like it's reinforced with wood.

@rail posted:

Is it on the layout yet? That looks good. It looks like it's reinforced with wood.

Thanks.  It is on the layout.  The wood is only for the Art Deco styling and trim.  It offers no structural support.

So here's a few more to show off the laminated beams made of layers of popsicle sticks.  I'll admit some tongue depressors were used also!   The lam beams were an idea to make it stronger.   It was a fun build.