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Timber trestles on the C&TT Railroad


D&RGW No. 427 (top) emerges from a mountain tunnel portal onto the Vista Grande trestle on the mainline of the C&TT Rail- road. Note the lone fire barrel (above left) on the wood platform,


this bridge can also be removed by slid- ing the rail joiners from the end rails and lifting it out of the way.


The third bridge in this scene is not a timber trestle at all but instead rep- resents a ballasted-deck steel girder bridge.


It’s nothing more than two


styrene scratchbuilt sides that slide into place between the abutments and the underside of the industrial particle board sub-roadbed. Since the roadbed is going through a vertical transition curve in this location, I didn’t want to go through the trouble of incorporating that upward arc into a wooden trestle design.


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which has a railing supported from below. At the bottom of the gorge (above right), large 12″ square timbers were used as foot- ings for the trestle bents of the Vista Grande trestle.


Its construction is fully described in


the July, 2000, article, so I won’t go into much detail here other than to say that when I showed the model to an engi- neer at a local bridge fabrication com- pany he said it looked pretty good but needed the addition of a few extra lay- ers of steel plating to make it look more accurate.


The bridge at Bloody Gulch I added another timber trestle at a prime viewing location near one of the entrances of the train room. At this point the base elevation of the mainline track is about 9″ above the top of the


supporting benchwork. The layout was built that way in order to have trestles over canyons and gullies without sacri- ficing


table strength. Again, I had planned on the trestle fitting in this lo- cation when I installed the risers. Before removing the particle board sub-roadbed, an impression of the curving track was made on craft paper using a Bright Boy track cleaner block. The trestle deck was built “upside- down” over the pattern using strip- wood cut from a large plank of bass- wood. All the wood was stained with a shoe dye and alcohol solution before being glued and pinned together.


SEPTEMBER 2013


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