After building The "High" trestle I thought it looked a bit out of place with a rocky base under it and a track on level ground in front, so I decided to lower the roadbed in front of it and add a "Low" trestle and to continue the rocky creek bed/gully theme out to the layout edge.
After lowering the roadbed supports it became obvious that as this is a curved bridge I would have to add a corner to get the track around to the next baseboard.
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| Lowered Benchwork |
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| Corner added, Bents roughed in to give an idea |
After building the trestle I then found that one of the bents ended up right on the edge of the layout so I added a further corner piece to give a more gentle curve across the front and put the bent a bit further away from the edge. It think it looks better as well.
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| Additional corner piece in front of bent added |
To extend the rocks under the high trestle out under the low trestle to the layout edge
I built a mesh and chicken wire support for the rocks to sit in.
The idea of the mesh is that rain will drain straight through and water will be able to evaporate thus reducing the length of time that the wood support will be wet.
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| Mesh Detail |
To make the low trestle I used the bents recovered from a trestle bridge that was on my old layout, it was made out of plastic molding and it looked shiny and unnatural, so I scribed "wood grain" using a razor saw and painted it grey to try and get rid of the plastic shine.
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| Recovered bents before on left |
The areas under the high Trestle that are not covered by rocks will be a "Meadow/Paddock" made from offcuts of synthetic turf simulating a grassy bank on the edge of the gully.
I have draped some turf over the area to get an idea of how it will look when finished.
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| Turf draped over area |
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