Saturday, September 5, 2015

Up on Kettle Creek...

With apologies to The Band.
I had thought that I had taken benchwork about as far as I could for now. Turns out I was mistaken. I spent a few hours today taking things a little further.
Now this is the scene I'm trying to replicate.  A steel trestle crossing a wide valley with a small water course running through. The actual creek is below the truss section of the bridge. Now I don't have the length to model this in full but what I have planned will certainly capture the essence.
I've taken a pile of Micro Engineering parts for the bents and the short girder spans. And I've started to scratchbuild a truss bridge for the span over the creek.
Details on the girder span will come later, when the project is complete. But I have enough to determine the length of the bridge and I will recycle the piers and abutments from the old layout.
From there I built the "valley floor" and then started on what will be part of the St Thomas yard.
For now a length of plywood will suffice to show the run of the bridge.
However I did discover that I have designed myself into a corner on one pesky little detail.
How am I going to get an actuator wire up through that abutment? I was feeling a tad smug about progress until I noticed that. Stopped my dead in my tracks for about 30 minutes while  I reviewed my options. And yes, the prototype has the head block ties that close to the bridge.
I have a solution that I think will work which will also get applied to a couple of other turnouts that have landed right on framing members.
There are no problems, only solutions!
I really need to think about getting some Homasote in. Anyway tomorrow will be a day building turnouts.




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