Bridges are expensive and trestles non existent
Sometimes my paralysis is due to analysis. The evidence is in the design render above. This is a composite drawing of every sub assembly design I captured. A drawing for the trestle bent. One for the assemblage of bents into the approach trestles, on either end of the bridge. One for the bridge trusses. One for the girders. One for the bridge tie strips. And a few I'm sure I've left out as well.
If most things garden scale are expensive, bridges are scarce, and trestles even more scarce. I've seen trestle "kits" for smaller scales, but the only item I've found in garden scale is an entire set of bents, shortest to tallest, like those plastic ones that come with starter sets in smaller scales. And like their smaller counterparts, they don't come with any girders, girts, or cross braces. Our only choice is to build our own.
I did find a beautiful aluminum plate girder bridge on display at the hobby shop, complete with rivet detail, but it wasn't for sale? Turns out it was the only remaining assembled unit and was needed as a template to construct more. The only person who knew how took that knowledge to the grave with him... As I said, scarce.
Because I couldn't find anything available trestle or trestle bent related, I started by making those. My other concern at the time was my novice status with the new table saw. I'd always had a radial arm saw in the past, but found it's terrible at ripping and shaping, far from rigid enough to get the job done. A new table saw was the answer, but my lack of experience took time to overcome. I finally did learn how to rip the scale 6x12s and 12x12s I needed. And 3x10 cross bracing too.
Buildings are made of plastic
Buildings are another "treasure". All the preassembled ones I found are plastic. Kits are either styrene plastic or thin laser cut plywood, neither of which will hold up to the elements for very long, let alone a hundred pound german shepherd smashing into it. For our buildings, we turned to concrete. Concrete blocks with a veneer of cast concrete patch to be exact.
We made a great start at casting... Actually casting a thin ¼" veneer with brick pattern sheets, blocking out windows and doors in the molding process. The cured castings were then spray painted an appropriate brick red or golden tan color, then attached to individual concrete blocks using thin set mortar. For detail items, I 3D printed display case windows for the ground floor, and window frames for the upper floors.
We actually have a few of those thin plywood building kits to assemble at some point. We'll try to preserve them using a thin epoxy coating before painting them. The multiple failures of our station platform roof panels, made from ¼" plywood and coated with with linseed oil, demonstrated the need for a more durable coating.
Unobtanium
The many references to "Unobtanium" and "Chinesium" throughout this site are meant to convey our "displeasure" with the current state of availability and quality of products for garden scale railroading. The direction of the hobby, subscription models, preorder sales, etc., are an entirely different subject. We will not be addressing those here. Simply stated, if it can't be found, it must be made. If it breaks, it must be repaired. If it continues to break, it must be replaced with something more durable.
As much as I'd like to figure out how to make my own stainless steel rail, as long as the hobby shop continues to stock the ten foot lengths of Piko flex track, I'll keep buying it. Even those once plentiful Aristocraft wide radius switches are no longer available, now pure unobtanium. That's next on the list. Trackage and turnouts.
My early experiments with 3D printing using PLA ended in failure. Basically, the plastic melted from the extreme heat of the metal rail baking in the Florida sun. I'll need a more resilient material to print switch ties from. If I ever finish my designs that is... I plan to try using PETG next. If these terms sound foreign, they are acronyms for the chemicals that make up the plastic filament used in 3D printing.
We'll cover all those details and more on our Barkyard Blog. It deserves even more detail, and we'll have a dedicated page for it here soon to add to the castings page.
Continuing Improvement
If you've made it this far, we have pages dedicated to all these subjects and our related projects. If not, we will soon add that content. We are slowly adding to our blogs, back dating the posts to when we actually did the work. New content will be added as time permits. If you don't see something, ask.
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Operating Over Our Howe Truss Bridge
We shot this video a few years back, after installing the pond, but before installing the waterfall and more scale "landscaping". You can see the finished product on our home page. The whistle heard in the background is the actual passenger train that ran between Mount Dora and Tavares on the old Seaboard line, now part of CSX. Sadly, CSX no longer allows our beloved passenger train to run on that stretch, now relegated to car storage.