hon30critter Hey Rich, You have already proven your bridge building skills so I'm looking forward to following your building of the towers. Great project!! I am about to start building a bridge for the club which will be 83" long with an easement in the curve. The bridge starts with a Central Valley 200' truss bridge and then uses an ME 85' plate girder followed by a series of 30' plate girder sections on the bents with 50' plate girder bridges between the bents. I have never attempted anything like this before but having seen what modellers like you have done, I'm not worried that I can pull it off. Dave
Hey Rich,
You have already proven your bridge building skills so I'm looking forward to following your building of the towers. Great project!!
I am about to start building a bridge for the club which will be 83" long with an easement in the curve. The bridge starts with a Central Valley 200' truss bridge and then uses an ME 85' plate girder followed by a series of 30' plate girder sections on the bents with 50' plate girder bridges between the bents. I have never attempted anything like this before but having seen what modellers like you have done, I'm not worried that I can pull it off.
Dave
I have to say, building an 83" long bridge with an easement in the curve is going to be some kind of challenge. I hope you will post your progress on that project. That 83" long bridge will dwarf my 30" effort.
Rich
Alton Junction
caldreamer That is an easy scratch building project using Pastruct and/or Evergreen sturctural pieces. Try building an ore hullett. I did and it took me three months to build. I used the article in the October 1997 RMC. It is really a complicated beast.
That is an easy scratch building project using Pastruct and/or Evergreen sturctural pieces. Try building an ore hullett. I did and it took me three months to build. I used the article in the October 1997 RMC. It is really a complicated beast.
I'll tell ya what. Post some photos of your ore hulett for my needed inspiration. I would have no objection to you posting some photos on this thread. It would be fun and instructive to see them.
I'm just a dude with a bad back having a lot of fun with model trains, and finally building a layout!
I will be using Central Valley Model Works Heavy Duty Laced Bridge Girders (#1900-5) to build the tower superstructures.
One of these kits contains 5 sprues, and each sprue contains 2 solid beams, 6 large X-braced beams and 3 small V-braced beams. Actually, these are half beams that need to be joined together to form a single finished beam.
I will be joining X-braced beam halves to solid beam halves to form the vertical and diagonal beams. I will be joining two x-braced beam halves together to form the horizontal beams and joining two V-braced beam halves together to form the horizontal cross supports.
So, in total, each kit will have enough parts to form 10 solid beams, 10 X-braced beams, and 10 V-braced beams. My estimate is that I will need 232 individual parts to build the two tower superstructures. So, that means that I will need to purchase 8 kits.
This will be tedious work because I need to paint the inside of each half beam before gluing the half beams together to form single finished beams. The insides of the joint beam halves need to be painted, since they will be visible through the lacings.
I am in the process of building a vertical lift bridge based upon the PRR bridge over the South Branch of the Chicago River in downtown Chicago. This is the prototype.
I began this project by building the bridge itself, using three Walthers Cornerstone Arched Pratt Truss Bridge kits, as detailed in the following forum thread.
http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/88/t/274913.aspx
Now, the challenge is to build the towers. They won't be skewed like the prototype, but more rectangular like most vertical lift bridges. The main superstructure of the towers will be accomplished using Central Valley Model Works Heavy Laced Beam kits.
I will post my progress on this part of the project as I move along.