Bridge Building

 The first train rolls into my newly completed Dark Hall shelf layout.

Not really, of course. It remains bare foamboard, despite being planned as a quick and dirty project before embarking on Gerralt Rd. This was a quick assemblage of bits to help me work out some decisions.

So, why has it taken so long?

Two reasons, I suppose.

The first is because it was also always intended to be a learning exercise to get me used to working in 2mm again. Part of that learning has been building things and then being dissatisfied with them. That station shelter is still in the purgatory between either being finally finished or dumped in the WPB.

As I've gone along, I've changed my ideas on what materials to use, which has been very valuable and will, hopefully, benefit both layouts.

The other reason is the road bridge that spanned the middle of the platform at Park Hall.

I was going to use the LCUT version, which is a nice little kit in its own right.  But the more I looked at it the more differences I spotted compared to Park Hall. OK, you could say it is only a scenic break, so does it matter, but the way the composition works, I think it does. As on APA, it will appear in most photos I take, and the composition means I'll find myself looking at it more than if it were at the non-station end of the board. Again, this isn't a criticism of the LCUT product.

So what needs to be altered?

The list is quite long, I'm going to have to scratch-build the abutments with their varied materials, and reduce the loading gauge so it doesn't tower over the tracks.

Perhaps the biggest change, though, is to give the road a decent amount of depth. On the real thing, the deck is approximately five or six brick courses deep. I also want to model a representation of the underside of the bridge, more for photographic purposes than for the normal viewer.

The question of the normal viewpoint for N is something I've been thinking about. If I didn't take photos, and the baseboard was eighteen inches wide, I would probably be quite happy with the standard of my modelling. But the camera shows up every fault.