Landwasser Viaduct

After finishing the full loop around my cubicle, the only real full loop was up and over my bookshelf. The lower track simply ended on either side of the bookshelf. This was just not good enough!

 How would I connect the two tracks across an almost 4 foot gap? I love problems like these. I can day dream for hours (spread over the whole day of course) about what this trestle, bridge, viaduct, causeway, or big mountain-side curve will look like.  I went through many revisions on paper and even more in my head. One of my favorites was a long, shallow trestle as seen below.

I started to draft it as seen above, but got discouraged by the number of trestles to build. I also didn't think it was very interesting. This is a Swiss layout after all, and Switzerland is known for wonderful bridges, tunnels, and mountain climbs. My favorite bridge in Switzerland is the Landwasser Viaduct. It is a single track, curved limestone viaduct with 6 arches. Spanning the Landwasser river, it immediately enters a tunnel bored into a rock face on one side. Read more about it on wikipedia.

The real bridge spans 446 ft at a height of 213ft. In HO scale, this is a grand 2.4 ft high and 5.1 ft long. I have been selectively... ok liberally.. compressing my layout thus far. I need something to scale, right?  Because this is a curved bridge, the length of 5.1 ft is perfect to span and curve around my book shelf that is 4 ft wide. I went to work designing this bridge in Sketchup. 

As much as I enjoy planning, modeling, planning, modeling, dreaming, thinking, then planning again, I had to actually start building this at some point.  This was for a cubicle and not a real permanent layout by any means, so I didn't want to spend a lot of money on this design. It is big as well, so it needed to be light weight. I work as a hardware engineer, so we get lots of shipments of parts. The point? Free building material!

 Before any comments come in (well, I don't get comments, so no problem :), this actually was a very nice way to build my first scratch built structure. Its cheap so I can redo things, and even throw it away after a while. I actually would recommend building like this all your buildings at least to fill the space that eventual kits or styrene buildings will go.

The first task was to build the pillars. and arches. This was enjoyable and quick to do because I basically make 5 of each assembly line style. The cardboard I used was from mostly used boxes. For the underside of the arches, however, I cut cereal boxes because they curve nicely.

After assembling the pillars, arches, and deck, I created a landscape profile to attach the bridge to. I tried to make this close to the real landscape with a cliff on the end that goes into the tunnel and a gentler cliff on the other.


The base that holds the bridge has riser foundations for the shorter pillars and beams underneath for rigidity.


I created the land form using the tried and true cardboard mesh.


Finally, I covered the cardboard with... well, I couldn't do plaster cloth or the other standard methods because after all, I have a unique method here.  So, I used packing, or butcher, paper. I laid it across the mesh, then cut it to form around the pillars.


After gluing the paper onto the edges, I used a hobby knife to slice off the excess. I really like the way it turned out. It is very light weight and sturdy which make it easy to move on and off my desk.

Thanks for reading, Peter Lieber