Wills Bridge Kitbash

[Autocar Publicity]

To make a change from locos and stock, here's a few words on a bridge I made. Initially I built a simple girder bridge. Wanting something more than the kit would build up into, I added some refinements, and built the bridge as a piece of model engineering as well as a scenic feature on a diorama. I used brass section for the waybeams, supported on wooden blocks. Hopefully the diagram explains how the elements fit together.

A little while later, I built another bridge, combining two Wills kits and my refinements from the first bridge. The inspiration came from a Don Breckon painting, Riverside Local, showing a GWR (sorry!) train crossing a stream on a combined girder and arch bridge. The bridge is currently in a basic, unfinished state, sitting waiting for putting in place. At the moment it is unpainted, so the different colours show the different elements of the kits and the bits of plasticard and plastistrut I have used. If anyone's thinking this sounds familiar, yes, I wrote about this in the Modeller (August 2007), though the diagram above didn't get used in the published article and I took these particular pictures this afternoon.