New Bridge on the Kensington Gardens Railroad

As summer was coming to a close and the leaves turning last year, Lukey (one of our grandchildren) and I were walking around the garden railroad talking about what improvements we could make by adding various features to this relatively tiny garden railroad.  

One idea was to add an automobile bridge from near the passenger station to the other side of the garden railroad near the truss bridge.  This bridge would "bridge" one side of our imaginary land to the other through the garden sort of like a worm-hole in space.  I liked the idea of adding more road-bound vehicles to this model railroad so I felt this bridge would be a good idea.  

I started working on the bridge over this past weekend and, as seen in the photos below, I made some good progress.

I have a long list of things that need to be done on our house too but I started with this little garden railroad project to refresh my memory on the intricacies of woodworking.  I'd rather make the inevitable stupid mistakes on a hobby project instead of on the house and, as expected, I made plenty of stupid little mistakes on the first day of cutting parts!  Fortunately, unlike at the beginning of last summer, all fingers are still intact though and that's a good thing!

Last summer when we first started talking about this bridge idea, my first thought was to design and build an impressive suspension bridge with lighting but, after thinking about it for a few days, I nixed that idea.  Building suspension bridge would be more difficult than I desired to tackle and I was having a hard time figuring out how to make this type of model bridge be durable enough to stand up to the year-round weather.  Besides, I felt a big suspension bridge for automobiles would distract from the main attraction...  the trains on this rather small garden railroad.  The suspension bridge wouldn't be a great idea for this small garden railroad.

By the time this spring rolled around, I had decided on designing and building a basic girder bridge...  keep it simple.  That being said, nothing I build ever remains simple for long.  I always seem to add more little details than I had originally planned!  I even do this with home renovation projects so it should come as no surprise that the same occurs when designing and building models.

In this case, I built the roadbed but what to do about railings or guardrails was still an unknown to me.  As I tossed around ideas in my head, I knew that this is where my mind would likely begin to add details to complicate this little project and that is exactly what happened.  This is strong reasoning for always building mock-ups before building the final product.

I knew that the era of this bridge would dictate guardrail designs so I needed to decide more firmly on an era to model.  Looking at the trains I already run on this little garden railroad, the era for this new bridge should loosely be in the early 20th century to the 1940s or even the 1950s to match the timeframe of my steam locomotive and my trolley.  If making an automobile bridge, it would be best to aim for the 1940s to early 1950s era to make choosing vehicles easier.  

As I was cutting lumber, my mind started wandering to my favorite real-life bridges for automobiles.  I happen to like bridges...  perhaps it is the civil engineer in me...  so I'm always paying attention to every bridge I see.

I knew I wanted to design a bridge that was visually interesting with distinctive details.  This bridge should be unique especially for a garden railroad.  The bridges from real-life that first came to mind are the many distinctive bridges over the Merritt Parkway.  

The beauty of designing a bridge with the unique character of Merritt Parkway bridges is three-fold...   first, I really like the bridges over this scenic Connecticut parkway...  second, these bridges were built in the era I want to model...  and third, these bridges have very interesting features yet each of the bridges features different architectural details making each bridge unique.  This was the way to go.

As I continued building the roadway of this bridge, I started wondering what architectural design features from the Merritt Parkway bridges I would include.  I felt this would be easiest to achieve by building a guardrail with the distinct character of the bridges over the Merritt Parkway.  I continued thinking about various architectural design features as I built and assembled the roadway surface.

Building the actual bridge roadway was pretty easy but building the grade crossings over the railroad tracks was far more time consuming requiring a lot more precise measurements, cutting, sanding and shaping contours and then making sure trains smoothly rolled over these grade crossings. They are looking good though so all the extra tedious work was worth it...

I also have grade crossing signals to add on this end of the bridge (photo above).  The far end of the bridge (seen below) will just get cross-buck crossing signs.  I'm thinking of just having a push button to control these grade crossing signals...  press and hold to keep the lights flashing.  This will give the younger grandchildren something interactive to do while watching the trains.  This, too, will be battery-powered just like the trains.

We still have no vegetation growth yet this season so the middle of the garden is looking rather stark and bare...

In order to install the grade crossings near the passenger station, I had to remove all the ballast that I had put down last summer.  This was the only area of the garden railroad that I had ballasted so it was the only area requiring removal.  After this bridge is finished, I'll screw down all the track and add the ballast again.

Another reason I decided to remove all the ballast in this area is because the snow and ice through the winter caused the ballast to gravitate toward and settle underneath all the track ties rather than only being in between the ties.  This caused the track to be wavy and unlevel.  Even if I didn't build and install these grade crossings I still would have needed to deal with this problem.  I don't want to experience this again so I'm going to screw down all the track in this area before I add the ballast again.  

I plan to glue down fine sand for the roadway.  Fine sand is a nice texture for roadways.  I have some waterproof construction adhesive that I'll use to hold the sand in place.  This should hold up well in the rain and snow.  For the wood between the rails, I'll just lightly stain and weather the wood.

I couldn't resist capturing a photo of the truss bridge in the background...  that is the passenger station platform in the foreground on the right side of the photo...

Those custom-built grade crossings are looking good...  I used my "Gramps" tank car as my test vehicle for testing the grade crossings.  In hindsight, It might be wiser to bring my trolley out to test because, if I remember correctly, there is less clearance under the trolley than any of my other trains.

Today, my goal was to build a mock-up of the bridge guardrail.  One of the purposes of building a small mock-up is to see how it would look so I can make sure the scale of everything looks good.  Ideally, I would prefer to make some of the balusters thinner but, as you can see in this photo, even at this size the nail gun split one of them.  Maybe I'll change the spacing of the four thinner balusters in between the chunkier balusters.  I also want to add some depth to the large end support on the left.  I like the shape but I need some texture on the large front surface.  It was good that I built this mock-up because I wouldn't be happy if I built this bridge exactly as seen here...

The photo below shows what this guardrail would look like from the roadway of the bridge...

The Kensington Gardens Railroad and Trolley line is shaping up nicely!

We've had a few very nice days so working outside has been nice and I haven't had to worry about rain warping the unprotected part of the bridge that I have installed so far.  I'll need to cover it all in plastic sheeting to protect it in a day or two.  We are forecast to have about a week of rain...  which we really do need.

All in all, this little project is coming along nicely.