Trestle construction, part 1

The trestle over the Mill River (which, truth be told, is really more of a creek) will be assembled in place, starting with the stringers and deck and then adding the bents last. Since this is a two-foot-gauge railroad, I only used four stringers, two under each rail.  Each stringer is actually a single length of 1/8” x 3/16” basswood (scale 10x16), but since the trestle is on a 21” radius curve, it should have separate stringers running between each bent and angled to follow the curve.

To mimic this look, I lightly scored the inside face at scale 12’ intervals and then made a deeper cut on the opposite side.  Then I could gently bend each joint slightly without completely breaking it.

The inside stringer was scored at exact 12’ intervals, which is 42 mm in HO, and then the others were scored at 0.5 mm increments (42.5, 43, 43.5 mm) to account for the curve. Each pair of stringers is assembled with short pieces of scale 2x8 as spacers, and then the pairs are glued together with short 1/16" wide spacer blocks. I didn't bother to place the spacers in prototypical locations since they will be hidden by the bridge ties.

After the glue dried I trimmed the ends to length, installed nut-bolt-washer castings, and added short timber retaining walls at each end to hold back the fill at the top of the abutments.

It will be a couple of weeks before I can continue this build, but I'm looking forward to installing the trestle and finally getting started on scenery! And at some point I need to get back to that forney project.