er bridge projects I used the dirty sur- face of a Bright Boy track cleaner or the face of a dirty sanding block to mark the location of the rail heads.
Noting where the abutments were to
be, I marked their locations on the paper template and took it to the workbench. The actual steps of how I constructed the trestle are fully covered in the Sep- tember, 1999, article, so I won’t repeat the process here other than to mention that, rather than simply gluing the tres-
tle bents together, I also used small, half-inch long steel brads like my father used when he was teaching me about model construction more than 60 years ago. This way, things are both pinned and glue together when possible. Instead of using commercial nut-
bolt-washer (n.b.w.) castings at loca- tions where the diagonal timbers would have been bolted together on a full-size structure, I used a dot of yel- low glue along with one of the brads to
hold the trestle bents together. They are extremely solid and strong, and their tiny heads do look like a bolts. For the nut-bolt-washer details at the top and bottom ends of the vertical truss rods,
I made masters from a
short piece of each of the music wire used for the rods along with tiny pieces of styrene to represent the bolts and washers. Dow Chemicals white bath- tub caulk was used to make RTV molds of each of the four different size mas-
This aerial view (top) shows the three bridges at Silver King Junction. The trio is com- posed of a pair of truss bridges, a timber trestle with a walkway and a plate girder bridge. A close up (above left) shows a clearer view of the walkway planks on the tim- ber bent trestle. Random length boards are attached to the extra-long ties and angle braces below the walkway to support the wooden railing. The center abutment (right) for the twin truss spans at Silver King is made up of large timbers. There is a centering key hidden below the center bents that helps align the bridge when it’s put in place. The space around the base of the bents is filled with crushed limestone ballast.
RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN 75
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