San Lorenzo Mini Layout | Building Burro Creek Trestle

howdy folks dave here at Thunder Mesa's Studio where I'm back with another build project for the O30 San Lorenzo mini layout this is going to be a good one too we're gonna be making a low wooden railroad trestle to cross over Burrow Creek or as the locals in San Lorenzo call it Ooyo de los Buros if you've been following along with this entire project you know that the San Lorenzo mini layout is a tribute to my late friend Vern Niner and his wonderful 30 Estraa and Sonora Grande layout and I'm using the structures and figures and details from his award-winning San Lorenzo diarama which happened to be featured on the cover of the 2015 annual the site for our trestle is just to the left of the new San Lorenzo depot here at a Royal Delos Burroughs and as you can see up until now the track has been supported by a couple of foam blocks and you know that's just not going to do since this is a mini layout this is a very tight 10-inch radius curve uh the little Bachman porters and other small locomotives have no trouble negotiating that but it is going to call for some creative engineering where bridge building is concerned fortunately I do have a little bit of experience building bridges on very tight curves like this back when I did the gruesome Gulch layout I had a very similar situation with a 10-in radius curve that called for a curved trestle bridge and I'm going to be using a lot of the same techniques here that I did back then the first idea I'm borrowing from the gruesome Gulch build is the laser cut curved stringer this makes things so much easier when building a tight radius curved trestle bridge like this uh I laser cut this out of some quarter inch thick basswood with the grain going this way so uh it's uh simulates a bridge stringers that are about you know scale foot thick now I know in real life trestles aren't really curved curved trestles aren't really curved it seems counterintuitive but it's true the rails are curved but the bridge itself is made up of short straight sections which are stitched together to create the curve but sometimes we cheat here in the model railroading hobby and uh that's certainly the case here with a curve this tight we're going to use some curved stringers it's really hard to uh curve a 12x12 like this in real life but uh we can get away with it at this scale the plan is to build the entire bridge deck here at the workbench and then we'll take it back and install it underneath the rails on the layout and build a couple of uh uh trestle bends for for down below and to that end I've also laser cut some bridgelength ties out of some 1/16th of an inch thick basswood the ties on microengineering and30 flex track scale out to about 6x6es so this is a good match for those so these are 6x6 by 10 ft in O scale you want longer ties that are spaced more closely together on a trestle bridge like this than what comes with you know the standard flex track and as is my usual practice I want to distress and stain all of these pieces before I assemble them the reason you want to stain the pieces before assembly is so that glue blobs don't show through if you uh glue things up first and then especially if you use like a wood glue any kind of PVA and then stain it afterwards the glue acts as a resist uh to the stain and you're going to get uh you know an uneven job you're going to get places where the stain did doesn't quite cover because of the glue right now I'm just sanding some of the char away from these laser cut pieces then I want to distress the tops of each and every one of these ties with a razor saw so it uh enhances the wood grain yeah it can be a little tedious but you know if you don't enjoy tedious repetitive tasks like this then maybe scratch building is not for you this is my favorite stain for simulating old weatherbeaten wood it's some u kiwi black shoe dye mixed with isopropyl alcohol and I'll give you my my recipe every so often i have to give the recipe out again it's real easy you buy one of these little bottles with the applicator top you take all the shoe you pull this out you pull all of the shoe dye out all of it into another container until there's just the residue on the inside then you fill it up with your 70% isopropyl alcohol some people like 90% uh either way and then put the lid on shake it up and you're done you've got your you've got your wood stain um you hold on to that that shoe dye in another container so you can replenish it put a couple of drops in there add more alcohol shake it up adjust the adjust the tone make it lighter darker whatever you want that's all there is to it if you have a whole bunch of small pieces to do like like all these ties easiest way to do that is to uh pour some of this into a shallow container and then just toss them in few at a time and swirl them around then you fish them out one by one and put them on a little pad of paper towels to dry when you're done you can pour the leftover stain back into your bottle so no fuss no mus i'm really making more ties than I need here but always better to have too many than not enough sometimes they want to stick together you're going to want to separate those they might look really dark when they first come out of the stain but they lighten up considerably as they dry when I built the Gruesome Gulch trestle I actually used little strips of ties little blocks they were all connected uh by little webbing in between the ties so I laser cut those and that made it really easy just to glue them on there this time I wanted to do excuse me individual ties instead because it's a little more realistic look I think um but that presents the problem of well how do we how do you know where to put them how do you position them on here and I considered uh printing out um a template that I could you know tape it down on and you know look at it from above but I found this negative piece uh left over from when I did the uh the gruesome Gulch trestle in my scrap box is is my box of scrap wood by my laser cutter and it has the precise alignment of those those tie strips that I created so now I can just lay this on here and use it as a guide to put the uh put the individual ties into place at least I think it'll work let's give it a shot so since this bridge is the same 10-in radius as that Gruesome Gulch trestle this should work to give me the proper alignment and position yeah they're closer together at this end and further apart and this you don't have any of these problems by the way if you're building a straight trestle it's much much simpler curved trestle is always a bit of a challenge trick is going to be to not glue my little impromptu jig to the bridge put some downward pressure on those and then lift this off and I can move on to the next tie i should note that I also filed this out a little bit to give myself a little bit more wiggle room okay on down the line we go i'm going to show you right here i've got some longer ties these are 12T ties coming out that's where the little vestibule is going to be and uh so you have some longer ties coming out there right where the vent is and that's where that fire barrel usually sits or sand bucket what I discovered as I was doing this is I really only need like half a template i can just put that right there and that tells me how far out these ties need to go and how far apart they need to be spaced on this side and then they'll automatically you know scrunch in on the other side just drop these in here make sure they're lined up right pull this off use it for the next batch and this vestibule we're going to have on the inside of the curve you know one of the points of the vestibule is if you're is if you're out on the bridge working on the bridge or something and a train comes it gives you a place to get away to escape from the train so it'd be a good idea to have one on each side so the moral of this story is um don't'll throw away those cut off scraps never know when they might come in handy of course doing it this way things aren't going to be you know perfect and you know sometimes it'll be slightly out of alignment etc but that's fine in fact that that's you want that because this thing would have been built um by guys with uh with hand tools basically in the late 19th or early 20th century so um yeah it wasn't it wasn't going to be perfect but it did okay came out even at the end now I'm cutting some guard timbers is out of some 4x6 stock and the guard timbers go along the outside edge edges of the trestle about about a foot in from the end of these ties and on the inside of the curve I make them about eight feet long on the outside they'll be longer than that have to be pretty short on the inside uh because it's such a sharp curve so I'll measure in a scale foot here there it goes on there just like that so I'm just putting them a scale foot in uh at the beginning and the end of of the beam because of the curve it's going to going to be a little wonky there on the edge but that's okay that just adds to the character right on the outside of the curve make each of these about 9 and 1/2 ft long okay that'll work one thing that really really dresses up a structure like this is some nutbolt washer castings and I've got some here from Grant Line i'm drilling some little holes basically I want that bolt washer casting to go through into every other tie from these U guard timbers got this supported underneath i'm using a number 70 bit in my pin vise my my twist drill now I need some sinoacrylite cut one of these off the sprew try not to lose it grab it with the tweezers dip it in the sinoacrylite and we push it down into the hole just got to do that about a hundred more times no problem i want to add some decking to these vestibules i've cut some of this uh copy stir stick into a scale twoft lengths now that is ready to install underneath the rails so this needs to go underneath here but first I need to remove the uh plastic ties that's pretty easy to do just need to cut off the castin spikes on one side once I get these ties off the rails should stay more or less engage but I'll be checking all the time and adjusting to make sure they do stay engaged we just go around and pop that off on one side where we just cut now I can cut through that webbing underneath the rail take off the last bit at each end there we go let's see how this fits like a glove now I'm mixing up some fiveminute epoxy resin which I'm going to apply to the bottom of the rails just in a couple of spots here and here just toh hold it in place because the rest of the rail is going to be held down to the bridge deck with with rail spikes just a little bit bottom of the rails here i don't want to use a lot of this because well it dries shiny and uh you know looks like epoxy it kind of tends to stand out a little bit at each end too now we carefully move the bridge deck up into position like so make sure the rails are centered over the top of those beams those curved beams and then I've got my same foam blocks that I'd used to hold up the track before trimmed them down just a wee bit so now I can use them to push up on this apply upward pressure and yes I'm going to check the gauge got my uh NMR standards gauge here pretty good that looks pretty good i also have my little wood block that I use while spiking rail and should fit snugly between the rails when they're engaged tight there that looks good i'll apply some weight to the top of the rails sure once again I'm going to check this one more time you can never check the gauge too often and yes I am aware that they make these handy little clamps microark has them fasttracks has them they hold the uh the track engage while you're spiking and doing things like this and I should probably pick up some of those i don't have any so I'm doing it this way now while I wait for that epoxy to cure we can move on to building the trestle beds once again my scrap box comes to the rescue and is a good example of you know why I don't throw things away that I think I'll need at some point this is a jig that I created for building trestle bents on the Big Thunder Creek trestle many many moons ago the dimensions are pretty close to what I need now for this trestle over Burough Creek they need to build two trussle bents excuse me the same height they're not quite as tall as this uh the bents are only about 9 ft tall to the top of the the trestle deck it's it's a little less than than 10 ft from there down to the the bottom of the creek so I need to modify this a little bit but then there's no reason why I can't use it for this project as well now I've shown you know how I make these before it's pretty straightforward i just uh draw the whole thing out on some graph paper like this i don't always ink the lines or get as elaborate as I have with this one but uh you know sometimes that's fun too draw the whole thing out put some clear packaging tape over the top and that way when you glue the pieces up they won't stick to the paper you can also add stops like I did here so I can just you know slide the uh the top sill in right there and then you know glue the uh the legs into place i'm going to cut this whole thing off right here i don't need this bottom still on here because this is a different kind of trestle bent this one is actually for a a beam trestle and we're going to be making a pile trestle here so it doesn't need this footer on it on a pile trestle you have these round poles or piles which are actually driven down into the creek bed or the AOYO in this case uh with a pile driver works well in places where there's not a lot of water going through there so I think that's a a good choice for this location it looks like I designed this with a 10x10 in mind for the top cell now as for the design of this trestle bent there's a great book out there let me grab it off the shelf so I can show you this book right here from uh Comback Publishing publishers of Model Railroader Magazine is an invaluable resource on just about every kind of railroad bridge ever built or designed it's all in here with very detailed drawings and explanations on you see I've got the timber trestle marked right there on how they were built and why they were built the way they were and how things like uh trestle bents go together how to do it properly even how to build a jig this is a great book um pretty sure this book is out of print now but if you can find yourself a copy out there on the interwebs or elsewhere I highly suggest you pick it up if you're going to be scratch building any kind of bridges at all this is a great resource to have i look at this book all the time trestle we're building today is a pretty basic one um it's sometimes called the lowboy trestle and it's not that long so there's just going to be a couple of trestle bents and I'm not going to need uh stringers tying the uh the bents together like you would on a taller trestle now I'm going to need four upright piles looks like the piles here would be about 10 in in diameter also so I've got some rounds that are pretty darn close to that size actually about 732 of an inch in diameter just adding some distress some more pronounced wood grain the edge of a razor saw for the straight ones I need four that are each 2 and 316 long cutting the straight ones it's fairly easy i'm rotating it so I don't split out one side there we go and to cut these angled piles and get them all consistent you know the same length same angle um I'm going to use a cutting jig so I'm taking a little piece of cardboard line it up there the top and the bottom the inside of that beam then I can draw a line like so there's my angle get some quarter inch and we'll put that on each side of that squeeze that in between those and when that glue has set up flip that over trim these off flush and now I've got a cutting jig where I can just lay my round in there and get the correct length and angle every time the important thing to remember is once you have it in the jig and you've done that first cut not to you know twist or move it around uh you want it to stay in there steady so you'll get a uh a matching cut on the other end when you flip it around in fact I put a little piece of tape on there just to make sure that's not going to move all right one down three to go and on the subsequent cuts you can just take the cut off piece and line that angle up at the top so then you only have one cut to make jigs make everything easier and then I just need four 6 by8 cross braces two three and number four got all my lumber now I just need to get some stain on all this again using the same stain that I used for the deck pieces and we'll let all that dry and now with the stain dry I've got the top sill pinned into place on the jig and I can go ahead with the rest of the assembly get a little yellow carpenters glue on here and we can go to town start with the straight piles i can push those into place straight up from the bottom a couple of pins to position them then for the angled ones I'm going to kind of rotate them until that angle meets up properly top sill upward pressure in the bottom there all right moving right along now I'm about ready for the cross pieces but um I want these to be up a little bit higher not in the same position as what's on the drawing here because the ground level on this bent is right here so we want that you know to be couple of feet above the ground i believe we can take the pins out and flip this over i want to support that underneath we can put that second cross piece on okay now we build the second one i'm only building two of these but you can see how you know with a jig setup like this you can actually uh whip through these pretty fast each one of these has not taken me more than 10 minutes wanted to have some big old chunky bolts on here so I've got some Grant line number 16s these are pretty good size dab of the down in the hole these are so big I don't even need tweezers now before I install these underneath the bridge do a little pre-weathering with my uh pan pastels going to add some some more rust to these bolt heads already painted them a dark brown but you know there's that a little more i want to have some streaks coming down i did a test fit on these over on the layout and found they were just a tiny tiny bit short so I added this cardboard shim to the bottom of each one of the bents and also helps them stand upright and this will all be uh covered up with dirt and rocks and stuff when the scene is finished pull out these foam blocks this cardboard makes it easier to glue into place too where I want to position these is right here where those uh vestibules are sure that's positioned correctly should be uh parallel to the ties and the top sill shouldn't come out any further than the ties okay that's about got it i'll put just a little weight on there dries now with the bridge properly supported I can start spiking the rail down into place permanently i'm using some micro engineering medium rail spikes and my Zuron spiking tool and since uh both the ties and the stringer underneath are basswood I can just push them right down in there it's pretty soft wood i'm using my little block here uh to keep things engaged and the way I like to spike uh on a bridge like this is uh alternating inside and outside of the rail so there'll be a spike here a spike here a spike here a spike here a spike here a spike here so and so on so every single tie gets two spikes but they alternate inside or outside rail find it helps to go in at a bit of an angle push it down flush like that and then when I finish the section I just take my block and move it down to the next part these spiking pliers have a little groove right there well two little grooves it's like a T-shaped groove that holds the head of the spike firmly in place more or less you got to test it to make sure it's in there right but if you get it right they are very helpful every once in a while you get a spike that's kind of deformed and you know don't hold on to it get rid of that one you don't need it not going to lie this definitely takes a minute but uh I think it's worth it look at that i hardly believe it broke my dang pliers i didn't even know you could break these well I had to finish up with oldfashioned needlense but think we got it let's try the dynamite car test well nothing exploded so I guess we did all right all right now I can finish up and detail the rest of the seat one of the first things I like to do is take my dark stain and go back over the center of the bridge between the rails where all the grime and grease and oil would drip and darken that up a little bit put some spots of black on here then I'll take my pan pastels and go over the heads of those rail spikes the sides of the rails get it you kind of get rid of anything that's excessively shiny rusted up now I've got a couple of fire barrels and I wanted these to look like you know they've been out in the weather for a long time and I accomplished that look you can see here how they kind of fade down towards the bottom just by painting them like regular barrels first and then dry brushing red over the top now I'll hit all of that with some clear matte finish now while you guys weren't looking I went back and added some retaining wall abutments uh under each side of the bridge and these are just built out of junk out of my scrap box i wanted each one to have its own personality so the one on this end down here is pretty standard looking but over here I want it to look like um it had to be shored up over and over again like they're fighting a losing battle against erosion there i also found this ladder in my scrap box we're going to put that right here these are easy enough to build just out of some scale 2x4s now it's time to start detailing the creek bed itself with real rocks and dirt and you know desert foliage things like that but uh this video is already running kind of long so I think what we're going to do is skip ahead and we'll show all of that in the next video which is going to be the final one in this San Lorenzo series at least for now where we uh do all the ground cover and the desert uh the desert plants and all the final details and just one last thing quickly before we go even though Burough Creek here is meant to be a dry wash there's going to be some water down underground or hidden pools back up here in the Aoyo so you would have some deciduous trees like these cottonwoods back in here and I'll be talking a lot more about those in the next episode okay got a thorough cleaning on the track including all that paint and pastels and gunk over on the bridge let's see how she looks hey thanks for joining me today for the build of Burrow Creek Trestle i hope you enjoyed the video and I hope you're subscribed with those notifications turned on so you won't miss the next one until then you can also follow for free over on Patreon that's patreon.com/thunderma or on Instagram at thunder.m mea and check out the resources available on the ThunderMA studio website at thunderma.studio as always a huge thank you to our Patreon members who help to make these videos possible until next time keep moving forward my friends adios for now