Good evening fellow forum travellers..... jan is my name. I usually prowl around on the Classic trains forum, but me and a few have an interest in HO as well. I have a question regarding Milwaukee Road's steel trestles like these:
How do you best build these in HO? How would you go ahead with the steel beams etc...? Some of these as you can see are straight and some are curved, are the curved ones much more difficult to build?
Cheers fellas!
Jan
"Bridges & Trestles" from Kalmbach books has a section on steel trestles. All the dementions are listed in feet and inches. An HO scale ruler would be handy for transferring the dementions to your chosen materials.
The pictures you've included with your initial post would be good enough to guide you through the kit bashing process if you went with a Micro Engineering kit. Check Walther's site, I'm sure they have a picture there.
The curved bridges are actually curved rails laid on a succession of straight bridges, each at an angle to the one adjacent. The only thing the modeler has to keep in mind is that the rails must be kept over the steel structure. Overhanging ties aren't sufficient support for the inside rail over the bents or the outside rail near the span centers.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with deck bridges under curves)
Also, if you go to walthers.com you can look up a couple of bridges that are similar to the ones in the pictures. What I would do to build these bridges, is go ahead and see if these dealers named above, sell the parts for making a bridge. or, for the bridges that are longer like the one near Avery, Idaho with the box cabs, take multiple kits from the walthers bridge or any other bridge and splice them together. The curved bridges are going to be a little harder. What I would do is take multiple bridges, like 5 or 6 of them and make small straight sections and splice them together all as one. It would also depend on how tight your curve is going to be so you might have to calculate how hsort or long to make these bridges and at what angle they need to be at.
Good luck with making them. I plan on modeling the whole Rocky Mountain division. It should be neat. See you over at the classic trains forum.
Happy railroading
James
Thanks for advice James. Me and a couple of friends talk of building something together and we all are heavy into mountain railroading, so we'll have a few trestles, helper stations etc...
See you around at Classic T.....
From the far, far reaches of the wild, wild west I am: rtpoteet