I built this trestle bridge for a large ravine diorama I had built. I wasn't happy with the diorama and put it aside. Later I salvaged the bridge before trashing the diorama. I decided it might be fun to build a thinner diorama to display an engine on top of the bridge. That idea went out the door too, but the trestle bridge survived. I still have this bridge in a cabinet. This page briefly hightlights how I built the bridge.

The bridge is 150 scale feet long and 120 scale feet tall. The design follows the practices of the Pennsylvania Railroad (or at least that is what I was shooting for). The measurements and overall design came from diagrams found in the book "Trackside on the Pennsylvania, Volume 2" by Jeff Scherb, published by Highlands Station, Inc.

Years before I built this bridge, I had attempted a real-world 4-foot long trestle bridge in N-scale. I eventually got so bored with it that I abandoned the idea and switched to a different type of bridge. What I had lacked then was not having a jig with which to make the trestle's bents. I was building it by applying board after board waiting for the glue to dry. The photo below shows a bent assembly jig I made based on the design I picked to follow. It was made from a sheet of Plastruct ABS, and individual thin strips of styrene that fit the scale wood I used. Since I built the bents out of wood, the jig needed to be made out of something to which wood glue doesn't stick. A jig made out of wood would not work!

Using the jig shown above, I built the various bents for the bridge. I didn't take any photos of the actual construction of these bents in the jig. The basic flow was to line up the vertical posts in the jig. I made small marks on the jig to identify where the horizontal boards were to go. I glued them to the vertical posts using yellow carpenter's glue (a very thin amount applied with a toothpick). When those were dry, I applied cross braces on the one side. After those were dry, I trimmed the bent on the bottom, installed the bottom boards, and removed the bent from the jig. I flipped it over and installed the cross braces on the other side.

The next photo shows a close-up of one of the bents. I started applying nut-bolt-washer simulations by making a tiny dot with an ink pen. It worked well. However, I stopped doing it after a while, because I realized that most, if not all, aren't going to be visible when the whole bridge is finished. Note that the bent has already been weathered using the famous india ink and alcohol mixture.

The bents at the end of the bridge have planks glued to them. These are supposed to act like bridge abutments, holding back the dirt and rocks from the surrounding surface.

With the bents done, my next focus was on constructing the bridge platform. The platform had to be perfectly straight. Strip wood has a tendency to warp a little, so I made this temporary jig which would hold the long boards in the right location. I placed spacer strip wood pieces in between the two sets of support boards I am gluing up here. Various weights, clamps, and metal bars were used to hold the whole thing together while the glue dried. The support boards are the ones that are stained already.

Next, I glued bridge ties to the boards. Special long ties were used for the area that will have the fire prevention water barrel.

Then two boards were installed that act as the outside guard rails (to help prevent a derailed car from falling off the bridge). I also applied additional weathering under the area where the rails will sit to represent the soot and dirt deposited by the engines and cars.

After the platform was finished, I glued the bents to the bottom of the platform. After that I installed the cross braces on both sides to hold the bents apart at the right distance. The final result is shown below (the curving is due to the photography, not the bridge's construction). Code 40 rail sections were glued to the top of the ties using 5-minute epoxy.

As I mentioned above, the second purpose of the bridge was to act as a "desktop" stand to show off an engine. The last photo is of the stand made out of plywood. I did finish the stand by staining it and applying edge banding, but I never took a photo of the finished unit.