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.