Sunday, June 3, 2018

Installing the Bridge at Lismore


The job this week was to plaster the area where I laid polystyrene last week, which was around the river opening north of Lismore.  While I had Friday off work, I did not do anything down the shed.  I was still trying to catch up on TV shows I missed over the last few weeks.  However, Saturday was a different matter.  After getting back from Soccer at about 1:15pm (which was won 7-1 by Kyle), I cut up some tissues into halves, thirds and quarters and then mixed up about 5 small batches of plaster.  Each batch is just under a plastic cup full of plaster.  The tissues dipped in plaster was laid around the bridge opening, covering the polystyrene.  After that had dried reasonably, I tried trial fitting the bridge.  I needed to determine where the abutments were to be cut into the plaster base.  So these were cut out and some pieces of pine were sunk as the abutments so that the top of the bridge was at the required track height.  It was starting to look pretty good.  Another small amount of plaster was used to nestle around the wooden abutments and I also poured the river base in plaster as well.

Today I got back down there after midday and painted the plaster a dirt colour.  This was followed by painting the bridge abutments a nice grey colour, and I then poured another batch of plaster around some of the areas that I had damaged and also completed the river base at the layout edge, after masking that off. 

The bridge was installed and the bridge track laid through the bridge.  The track was cleaned first, As I thought that was a sensible thing to do, as it will be difficult to do in the future.  I cut off the length of rail at the north end and joined that up to the bridge track.  I then cut a small matching piece of track for the southern end of the bridge and joined that up with existing track.  I had to pack the tracks slightly with a couple of pieces of thin card and test ran a few wagons from Lismore yard through the bridge quite a few times.  They ran well, with no issues observed.  I then decided to ballast the last 35cm of track on the northern side of the bridge and that has now been all glued in and looks good.  I then gave a final paint covering to the touch up plaster areas.

I must admit that the whole bridge scene looks pretty good.
The river opening looking north towards Murwillumbah.

The river opening looking south towards Lismore.

The finished product looking north.

The finished product looking south.

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