Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
Allen, The nice thing about modeling a small culvert is that you don't have to remove any roadbed. The headwall is usually more than eight feet from the centerline of the track so you can just put the headwall in and scenic around it. Remember to make the headwall wide enough to account for the wrap around fill cone on each side. Many situations can be handled by only installing the near side headwall because the far side headwall would not be visible. If you use small culverts they would be spaced closer together. Make sure the drainage pattern around the scene fits and that the water appears to be flowing downhill. Trestles are often used where the existing soil is poor and the engineering department has determined that a trestle is less expensive than removing the poor soil and replacing it with good soil. Such situations exist in swampy areas. In this case you will have a series of short uniform spans (ten to twenty feet each) with a longer relief span of fifty to a hundred feet every so often for a channel to flow across the track centerline. Many trestles of this kind are built without refuges since an employee could just jump off into the mud if a train came along. Other trestles are build in urban areas where the right-of-way (R/W) costs would be too expensive to build an earth fill wide enough to support the track. Retaining walls will also be used in that situation to reduce the width of the roadbed at normal ground level. In another situation, during the construction of the transcontinental railroad, a trestle was built and then earth was brought to the site and dumped between the rails and the fill was created later. The ten to twenty foot spans described above would be built of timber stringers on timber pile bents with a steel beam or girder span for the longer spans. One thing to note, as the height of the rail above normal ground increases, so does the span. The reason for this is because as the trestle height increases, the cost of building the pier supports goes up substantially. By making the spans longer, fewer pier supports are needed and the result is a lower initial construction cost to the railrooad. When building any kind of trestle or bridge, take special care to model the abutments and girder ends properly. I particularly like the bridge shoes sold in packages of four produced by Micro Engineering, Inc. Good Luck - Ed
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag

Update Reply

Subscriber & Member Login

Login, or register today to interact in our online community, comment on articles, receive our newsletter, manage your account online and more!

Model Railroader Newsletter See all

Sign up for our FREE e-newsletter and get model railroad news in your inbox!

Subscriber & Member Login

Edit post

Post Body

Tags (Optional)

Subscriber & Member Login

Users Online

Search the Community