Railway Arches: Part 2

Well I finished off the arches sooner than I anticipated. I guess sometimes you just get caught up in the making and forget how long you've spent being socially distant from everyone!

Here's the finished arches on the baseboard.

There are eight in total spanning almost 1220mm. I had to fashion some small end walls from brick paper and card to fill the gaps at other end. I had thought of fitting the  board the length of the arches or leaving a bigger gap at one end. But in the end I decided to put it centrally.

Once in position I began to think about the kind of fence I wanted to separate the arches form the railway. I thought about a few possibilities, the main consideration being not to obscure the arches too much. Chain link would do the job, but I thought some concrete panels might look quite good.

Here's how I made my test piece. I used 2mm thick card and cut it into 8mm strips for the panels and 3 mm strips for the posts.

Initially I thought I'd make the fence posts long enough to fit into predrilled holes in the base board. I might regret having changed my mind on that.

The four 8mm strips were set out and carefully aligned at one edge. On one strip I marked out 25mm intervals and using a small square carefully glued the posts to all the strips working my way along.

When I'd finished one side it looked like this.

The next job was to turn the section over and glue more 3mm strips in line with those on this side to give the look of a panel sitting in th groove fo a concrete post.

The next task will be to paint and weather it. I might even add some graffiti for realism!

In 00 gauge it's 8 ft tall. The 25mm spacing of the posts was for convenience of making out. I didn't think 1mm would impact the sense of scale too much! 

I put this test piece in position in front of the arches and it's a good height. It doesn't obscure too much of the arch detail but it still gives a realistic representation of a fence.

Although a bit tedious to do, cutting the 8mm strips makes it look like those fences where the concrete panels slide in. Time to make some more.

Railway arches: Part 1

I've got an idea for a small, industrial looking layout to replace the winter scene I created for Christmas. I want to include a row of arches, the kind with businesses under them. I had a look around at the kits available and decided to give Superquick a try. They do a set of embankment arches that looked like they would do the job nicely.

Now it's nothing personal, but I'm not a fan of Superquick. I find the instructions lacking in detail at crucial points in the build. Having tried to assemble one set I couldn't make them fit properly and the frustration was building. I decided on a different approach.

I cut a piece of 6mm ply for a backing for the arches. You'll see that in the photos of the build process.

With the ply back cut, I separated the main arch structure from the sheet, cutting away the assembly tabs. They come in pairs and can be separated into two single arches.

Turning them over I added two layers of 2mm card. To shape it around the arch I cut small pieces of card and glued them in place around the arch.

 I added more card at the edges and in the middle. This sets the arch 4mm away from the backing sheet.

Once dry enough to handle, the arches were glued to the ply board, taking care to line them up properly.



A good square edge to the ply is important, otherwise there is a chance that the arches will be out of square and as you progress from one edge to the other the error will get more pronounced.



The inside detail of the arch can be selected from either a plain bricked insert, a brick wall with a pair of doors or a business front. The doors are glued to the insert from the back and some 1mm card is used to give some support to the structure.

A sharp knife was used to follow the curved edge of the arch when trimming back the card.

The insert was then glued into position within the arch. The idea was to give some depth to the arch.

Here are the first four arches assembled. There will be eight arches in total with a single track running above them. Butresses and a small retaining wall will be added.