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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