 The What's Neat show is sponsored by Lombard Hobbies. Your value hobby shop for over 40 years of modelers helping modelers. Big inventory, value pricing, fast shipping, and great service. And by Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at bachmentrains.com. And thank you for helping us support the best hobby in the world. This is What's Neat for November 2022. I'm your host Ken Patterson, the host of this wonderful show called What's Neat that we produce every month for the model railroad hobby. And this month is a great show in that I share with you how to build trestles. We build light near trestle on the Rio Grande Southern in about an hour and six minutes from start to finish, I take you through the entire process of how to build this beautiful structure, which I will say is one of the most accurate models in HO scale of this bridge that has ever been built. I relied on photographs and drawings and everything that was at my disposal in order to nail this one. So I think you'll enjoy this month's how to video on building light near trestle this month on What's Neat. Also this month, Doug Blaine stops by and shared with us a lot of wonderful Christmas gift ideas. Bachman Industries produces and manufactures, train sets in the Christmas theme and standalone products as well. In HO scale, O and 30, three rail O scale, G scale, all of it is to be seen because after all, it's almost Christmas and what a better gift than a train set for your favorite model railroader out there. I wanna say thank you very much to Lombard Hobbies for helping us promote this hobby. They are the hobby shop that caters to the expert and the beginner with great prices. They don't have sales because they've got the best prices all year long. So check them out at Lombard Hobbies.com or you can visit them in Lombard, Illinois. It's an absolutely beautiful store and they would look forward to you walking in and saying you've heard about them on What's Neat. Be sure to check out the What's Neat this week's video show podcast that we shoot every Saturday night except for the last week of each month where we bring you updated news with special guests, our regular podcast crew and a lot of new products as they're introduced throughout each and every month. It's an amazing show to watch What's Neat on YouTube. And so with that, let's continue on with the rest of this November 2022, What's Neat? Hi, I'm Ken Patterson and in this videotape, we're gonna discuss the entire process of building a trestle for your model railroad from the ground up. For this example, I'm building Lightner Trestle. It was a trestle on the Rio Grande Southern Railroad at Milepost 160. It was actually Bridge 160, Milepost 150. Sometimes the trestle was referred to as Franklin Trestle because it was right at the Franklin Junction where the Rio Grande Southern had a split to go up to the Boston or the Calium at mine. But this is a really cool structure worth building simply because in 1952, the highway department came through and put a highway right through the middle of the trestle. So it adds all the interest of having a road, having the trestle, having the creek, having the deciduous pine trees and the scenery that goes around it. This is all set up to make for a very interesting scene. So I'm designing the base of this layout out of eight layered sections of foam. I very carefully studied the topography of the location where Lightner Trestle is in order to carve the topography. And I carved all of this about nine months ago because this project was simply an assignment. This started out as a job where one of my accounts, Blackstone Models, requested that I do the famous shot that Mr. Richardson shot of the final Rio Grande Southern train going across Lightner Trestle and Plowing Snow. This is a very famous photograph. It's hanging up in the Denver Union Station. And Blackstone Models thought it would be really nice to represent their product, pushing the snow across the top of Lightner Trestle. So I thought I could just throw it together very quickly, build a photo prop and get their shot in less than a few days. What turned into a few days now is nine months into the project. It's been sitting in the garage for six months of that time. And I brought it out to create this video on building trestles. Because there's a lot of important information that you're going to attain from this that you can use to build any trestle in any scale on your model railroad. Dimensionally, every trestle on the Rio Grande south-southern, all 143 bridges that they had, were all just a little bit different. And so on this project, I refer to the prototype photos to get my dimensions. On your bridges, you could refer to drawings that are in magazines. There's plenty in narrow gauge gazette and prototype photos of the old logging industry where the authors of the magazines had the foresight to actually put in drawings for us for the benefit of us modelers. So dimensionally, you can get your drawings from that or you can just follow along in this video and I'm gonna tell you exactly the size of these dimensions and you can literally just build this bridge on your layout after watching this video. Now to do this project, as I explained, I used a lot of foam. I've carved out, pre-carved out all the topography already so that it would match the bridge when it was put in place. Because it's very easy to get these measurements off of the prototype photos that are in the books by counting the stories and figuring out how tall they are. That really was the math to figure out the topography. After the trussledents are built, you'll find that you'll probably have to come through and just do a minimal amount of fitting. Maybe take out an eighth or 16th of an inch and then make everything blend in. That's your final carving. Each section of foam is 15 feet thick. They're two inches in actual measurement but a scale HO15 feet. So that allows us to figure out the topography a lot easier. There's eight sections of foam stacked up here. This entire diorama is now carved. It's gonna be painted with latex paint to seal everything. And I'm anticipating putting oak sides on the side of it to add firmness to the diorama so I don't get any flexing. So at this point for this video I wanted you to see the foam in its pink state before it gets sealed. And we're gonna go on now and learn how to build a jig to start building our trussledents next. Now in order to build the bridge deck at the top of the bridge I'm relying on every single prototype photograph that I've got of lightener trussle so that I can get this bridge to be perfect. I want the top deck. It's the most important part. It's the part the train runs on. So after I took the long ruler and I drew a 350 foot radius curve because I know that's the curve of the bridge. And then I drew a second line that represented the second, the outer edge of the track. So I drew a 350 foot radius and about a 358 foot radius in order to be able to lay out the bridge deck. And the bridge deck is simply the wood that we used spliced together to make the top rail of the bridge. And then we're gonna lay our bridge deck ties right on top of this for the whole way all the way through the span because I've got it drawn out here on the wood. I've got where all the trusses are gonna be drawn on here, 16 foot on centers. And if you do the math, this bridge is 350 feet across at a radius of 350 foot. So there's a lot of dimensions here that are actually easy to remember on this. Now for the center span where the concrete are where the girders are gonna go, I've been using this micro-engineering 50 foot girder to help me represent my measurements. I've got the highway drawn on the plywood where it should be. And I've also drawn on here where the steel structures are gonna be that are going to hold up the bridge deck. Now this bridge deck itself, I've experimented with different sized lumbers. So that when the bridge ties are on and I've got some micro-engineering switch ties that I'm gonna lay on the inside here, everything's gonna be flush. All the dimensions came out, just messing around with wood. And again, copying the prototype photographs to get this side rail to look just like the rail that you see here in this picture on the prototype shot. So everything's laid out. The math should work. This should just set right into place on the diorama because we know that the diorama is very close topography-wise, as close as I can get it by measuring the height of each truss from the photographs. So that's where we're at right now. Now I'm just gonna lay deck ties all the way across the top of this glue them all down and we should have a really nice bridge top ready to go. I'm using my HONNMRA narrow gauge, HON3 gauge. I'm using the flange way section which has got a center point on it. I'm using that center point to find the center point on the bridge. Taking our small fine rail and I'm taping the rail down. You see all this blue tape holding it down at the center line so that what I'll have to do now is lay the next rail right next to it. Use my gauge, make sure the spacing's the same distance apart. And then we're going to take a drill and we're gonna drill the holes to make it easier to spike so we don't damage the head. And then after the holes are drilled I'm gonna go through and punch in spikes all the way around until I get both rails in place. And then I need to put the guard rails on the outside. Those are the wooden rails that hold everything from sliding on the top sides. Those rails will follow the entire 350 foot bridge on both sides. And then I also need to put in a guard rail on the outside of the actual narrow gauge track. The Rio Grande Southern put their guard rails on the outside unlike today's prototype that puts them on the inside. So therefore in case the train would derail it wouldn't completely, the theory was roll off the bridge. It would get caught up in those rails and keep guided into the centerline of the bridge rather than going to the side and falling down as many as many did. So at that point, once all those tasks are done we'll be able to test fit this onto our bridge and make sure all the math which I'm sure it will match. We'll match up to our topography. Okay, I haven't finished the bridge top yet but I took out the bridge off the piece of plywood just to do a test fitting on the diorama to make sure everything fit just right. To make sure that the highway overpass matched where the overpass and the road are. And I built my 1% grade into the trestle. It's gonna be four feet higher on this side than it is on the other side. I'm using a grade percentage of grade level here to double check my work and that is reading 1%. So now all I've gotta do is build all the trestle vents and the cement foundations to fit appropriately across and match the photographs exactly. And this thing should just simply fall together pretty much like a puzzle. So let's just see how this turns out. Now we're gonna talk about building the jig and that's the component that you use for putting the pieces of wood together in order to form your trestle and ensure that every one of your vents are exactly the same size. Again, I'm gonna rely heavily now on this video on the Rio Grande Story. And on this volume, this is volume three of the Rio Grande Southern Story. And inside these books, you're gonna find great dimensional materials on what to use, size of boards and what have you to build your trestle. And there's great plans in this book. Another great book that I found mallets on the Mendocino Coast and that's the Casper Lumber Company book. And inside of there, they've also included really nice drawings of trestles and the vents. And the reason that's important is, and I'm gonna get to that here in just a second, is that I used in fact this narrow-gauge gazette. And this is the issue from January and February of 1987. And it's got a Rio Grande Southern jig are bent drawn in it and the stories are correct for lightener trestle with the 16 foot and 20 foot for the second story. So what I wanted to do was build a jig using that photograph. Now I did this in large scale years back. About 12 years ago, I built this large jig. And what this essentially was, was where I built one bent first and then I lined small pieces of wood on either side of that bent to ensure that I could build the same bent over and over. And then I used a staple gun and one inch staples and I went through the process of building the trestle in the backyard, which in large scale came out to be about five feet high and 20 feet long on a 10 foot radius curve. And I went along and I stapled it and put it together and fastened it over a period of, I want to say five days, it cost a hundred bucks to build it, 25 dollars in staples and fence pickets, just 75 dollars in fence pickets and we had a bridge for under a hundred bucks. So with that, which came out really nice, with that we're gonna use the same principle for in the HR scale, trestle. So here's the drawing out of the narrow gauge consent. And essentially what I did was I took that drawing and I laid on top of it a piece of plexiglass, okay. And the reason for that was, well, what I was gonna do is see through the plexiglass and with the paper attached to the backside of the plexiglass, I could lay out all my pieces of wood to build the very first bent, make sure everything matched exactly, no magic here. And then what I did was once I had the first trestle bent built, I took small pieces of plexiglass that I cut up in the table saw at the links and what I would do is I would glue the pieces of plexiglass on either side of each one of the 12 by 12 posts. And what that would do is form a jig after repetitively doing it to the entire thing that came out and looked like this where I could repetitively build vents over and over. Now I'm gonna take this wood out and show you kind of what it, how it went together and the way it looks. I drilled holes on the backside of it so I could push out the vents. Here's a small one that I'm building right now for a small trestle. Now midway through this project, and I didn't know it, I found out that Black Bear Construction Company in fact makes jigs that are ready to go for us on the market. Now these are all laser cut, they come with a piece of plexiglass, it's slideable to help you make your cuts just like what we're gonna be doing with a straight edge. And this is a great way to get your sizes and dimensions so that you can get started on your trestle jig right away. And they make trestle jigs in a multitude of scales and various Rio Grande Southern trestles and regular Rio Grande Western GRDNW trestles. So it's a thought now that I may not have built a jig, I might have just went with the pre-built ones for this project. But at this point, that's how I went about building the jigs for the trestle. And this is what the finished jig looks like and what this is gonna enable us to do is to seriously speed up the time that it takes to build a trestle bent. And all you simply do is once you get the jig built, you're gonna lay our 12 by 12 sticks in the jig and build our first story, our first section right here. And the way this is designed is I can cut all my 45 degree, all my various angle cuts that match the pattern of the trestle by simply laying a ruler across the top and taking my saw and starting to cut right here along the cut lines that we've got predetermined by our pieces of plexiglass, the design, the jig. Now I'm gonna cut this section right here, perfectly square and these outside vents are getting cut at their appropriate angle. Very simple process. She's cut all the way through, blow out my parts and I can put in my top. And just like that, everything mats up tight. The angles are cut and now we've got our top section. Now I lay this bent across where the next cut or this ruler across where the next cut's gonna be. Keep my vents tight to the top. And I'll be able to cut right here where the bottom foundation's vent is gonna go. Now I'm cutting all four sticks of wood at the same time. The outside sticks are getting the angle cut on them. Two center sticks are being cut square completely by the jig and the saw. I cut all the way through here and we can lay our other piece in here where it's gonna go. I'll spin the jig around a little bit. And we can cut this bent to the size that we need. We've built our first story. That's this section right here. And then the build a second story, which take down to right here. If it were a half story, I've got the jig designed with the cross cut lines to do a half of a story. But in this case, I'm gonna do another full story down. This would be a full section. And I need to add two more stringers, two more right here, right here. Because the second story of our Rio Grande Southern Trestle has got the additional angled stringers here. So I've got a total of six, 12 by 12 posts. And I wanna cut right here across just like we did before so that these two angled stringers have the appropriate angle so they'll fit flush. So again, the jig is helping me to cut these pieces right here with the appropriate angles. Let me double check my work right here, make sure I'm doing that right. They are piece in here, already pre-cut. Everything's perfect so far. The jig is doing its job. Look how fast this is going. Just a few minutes to build an entire Trestle bent as opposed to the very first bent that I built that took almost an hour because we were hand laying those pieces of wood over the top of the drawing. Now I'm cutting six pieces of wood here. Four of them are getting their angles cut on them. The two center straight pieces are getting cut completely square. Just as easy as can be. Got our next piece of wood to cross right here. It lays right in the jig and I'm able to cut the sides off perfectly, lining it up and just cutting it. This jig saves time. Now these jigs you can buy commercially. You can buy them on the internet. Various sizes, various types of Trestles. Of the 167 miles of main line that the Rio Grande Southern had, they had 143 bridges and not one bridge was built exactly the same. Every bridge, every Trestle had different variants in it. I'm gonna cut this one right here and this will finish out the bottom of our Trestle bent. All six pieces of wood I'm gonna cut right here. And this is how the jig helps us. We could have never done this individually by hand this quickly. Getting this perfect here. Laying our bottom post. Essentially built to complete bent. In this case, it's exactly the height that I need to fit onto the diorama where it should fit. Just use the jig and lay your cross braces on like this, where they belong. And once everything's dry, just simply lift the whole Trestle section out of the jig and you're complete. The job is done. I'm using Elmer's exterior wood glue to glue this together. It's the strongest glue that I found of the interiors, exteriors, all the different brands. I tried the Gorilla glue on this and the best glue that I found that accepts the stain very readily is this Elmer's exterior glue. And you just simply take the parts and we're gonna use the jig to glue it together. I dip the parts in glue. Take out each part, dip them in glue. I'm also gonna use a dental tool to apply the glue. Just dipping it in a little bit of glue on top of this Woodlun Scenic Cement glue container. The lid works really well for that. Now for these ends, I'm gonna dip my dental tool in and just put a little bit of glue on each end of the stories. I want this to be as strong as I can. So I'm putting the glue on liberally and I can clean out the excess with a razor blade. The jig is holding everything in place while I glue it. So as it dries, we know that everything will be tight. I drop in this piece right here. The first story is now glued in the position. I start the same process again on the upper boards. I start just dipping them in glue and attaching them just like that. Everything's going in tight. Glue dries pretty nice. So it's not gonna be obtuse. You're not gonna see it. We can scrape off any excess with a razor blade. See, this is just going together like a kit. Things pre-cut, everything fits tight because of the way we design this. Again, I'm gonna use my dental tool and I'm gonna come back and apply some more glue to the end of the next second story bottom here. And it's just ditto. You can sit here and watch TV. One eye on the model, the other eye on the TV. This is kind of mindless labor after you get used to the repetition. It goes very quick and you don't need to pay total attention to it. You can do other things while you're doing this which kind of makes it enjoyable. Now that's glued in tight and we just simply glue the bottom ones now. Same one, dip them in the glue and everything goes together real nice. It's all six. I've got glue put in the bottom piece. Trussell gets glue top and bottom. We want this to be as strong as we can if this Trussell takes one hit the way it's designed with the sectional. It's gonna come apart as opposed to if this thing were just solid stringers like this all the way top to bottom with no breaks, it would be a much stronger design. The glue would be, I would trust it. So here we're gonna let this set now for about 20 minutes and then I've got holes on the back side of this so that after it sets up I take a needle or a pin or something or a nail and I can stick it through the holes and help have this whole thing come out nice and clean just a little bit at a time. I'm really happy with this. We'll just let this set up for about 20 minutes and every bent that I'm designing, I'm designing off the pictures in the book to make sure they're exactly the same height as in the photographs. And so far it's matching up with the topography with very little carving, additional carving to make sure everything fits. It's working out really well right now. Blacks, dark walnut, looks really good. When you go over it with a little bit of gray after it dries, it makes for just a perfect weathered wood tone trust effect look. Then after each piece of wood is stained, I wipe them dry, wipe them down to get off the excess. Each piece just like this. Gives a real nice, just like that. Now with the cross braces on the truss, it's easier, it adds strength. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take a needle and I'm gonna stick the needle underneath the main beams instead of using the push outs on the back and just simply lift this piece out of here so that I can lay it on a flat table surface and then attach the bottom. And what I'll do is I'll take dabs of glue and a dental pick and simply apply the glue to the bottom of each component. Dye braces, position them, wait 10 minutes and this will be dry and I'll put a cement foundation underneath this at the excess glue with my tool. Now I'm cutting the bent that's going to sit center right over the creek center. And so this bent will sit on top of stringers, joists that run across over the top of the creek. So this one's gotta be cut to an absolute specific length to fit underneath the track and on top of the joists and that's the cut that I'm making right now. After I've completed each bent, I have to represent the concrete foundation that the bent sit on top of and for that I'm using one eighth and in this case I'm using two one eighth pieces square put together. But usually what I've been doing is taking one eighth by one quarter inch stock and cutting that up. Some of the larger trestle bends at the very bottom of the creek bed have got almost two foot high sections of cement. So in that case I'm using a quarter inch by three eighths inch stock and that sets really nice for the cement foundations when it's all finished off. Paint it gray and then work it into the diorama into the scene. Okay, after spending about 48 hours building nothing but trestle bends, I have built all the trestle bends now that are necessary to do the lightener trestle project and I have test fit. I've placed every one of the bends in its location and all they're doing is simply setting there. They're not taped in, they're not glued in. The bridge top is simply sitting on top of the bends and holding them into place. And what I did was I used a hot foam cutter and I cut the final carving of each bend's placement. And then what I'll do is I'll remove the trestle and even flow out all the topography so that it matches. The only last thing that we've got to do is to build the center in this bridge. There's a center girder section where they put the highway right underneath the bridge back in the early 50s. And so what we're gonna do is build the girder section out of micro-engineering 30-foot girders, cut them up, make them fit to the bridge bottoms and everything should line up just right with the girders that go from the ground up to the supporting under section of the bridge. So using the prototype photographs, again heavily to model this part, I didn't bend, I'm sorry, I did not make one trestle bent and place it without referring to these photographs. Every single bent is just a little different even up to the cross bracing where they place them so that I can make sure that this model is completely as accurate as we can make it up to this point. Now the next thing that I've got to do and this is something very important and this is a decision that I've made midstream on the project and that is this. This diorama is made out of multiple sections, about eight pieces of foam, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight pieces of foam up and down. It's pretty thick but at the center where the creek comes in, the foam is only four inches thick and I'm seriously concerned that when this diorama gets transported in its condition now, if I build the bridge now, what'll happen is as the diorama gets lifted up, you get movement, you get a half an inch of movement and that's not good, that'll flex, that'll torque the bridge. So the remedy, the cure for this is to wrap this diorama which will eventually be a modular section for a layout in oak. So I'm gonna take the sides and I'm gonna take a router and we're gonna router out grooves in the sides of the entire diorama. I'm gonna have to shave it down, make sure the foam has got a perfect radius curve to it and then I will put in the router groove that we make on the diorama, one by twos. I'll trim them down so that they're absolutely flush with the exterior smooth surface. Then I'll wrap oak plywood around by wetting the plywood first in water and then fitting the curved sections, the preformed wet and curved sections of plywood onto this diorama. Now I've got an 11 foot curve around this edge on the outside. So I'm gonna require one and a half sheets of plywood, probably 16 to 18 inches high and eight foot and a four foot section to be able to make that 11 foot wrap around curve. I'll stain the plywood black. I'll finish it with high gloss polyurethane, which will just allow the wood grains relief to be seen. You won't see any actual wood grain because the black, there will be no brown tones at all, we completely black with wood grain as if it's a piece of stereo equipment. So at that point, then we're gonna have, look at that the trussle pieces fell down there but we'll have a perfect surface to build our trussle on with no risk of flexing and destroying the bridge when we move the diorama. And that actually upon that finishing the road and finishing the top scenery, this thing will be finished. So let me work on the base, we'll get through that section and then we'll glue the trussle in place. Before I can put the plywood sides on, I had to make sure that the sides of the diorama were completely square. And what that means is that I ran the square all the way around and I cut off in some areas almost a half an inch. And then I took my Stanley planer and I smoothed it all out smooth and I did this all the way around the whole diorama so that when the wood goes on there, the wood's going up and down smooth and it's got a lot of surface for attachment. Okay, so everything's been routered out. You can see the router lines where I cut all the grooves for the small blocks of wood to fit into. And now I'm painting and I'm sealing everything so that I don't get any, so I can slow down the rate of foam shrinkage. By sealing everything, the glue won't interfere with the foam on the exterior when we wrap the wood around. So that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna finish painting this whole diorama all the way around with latex paint and let it dry for about two hours. Now I've got blocks of wood and they're all wet in a bowl and that's the magic of using this gorilla glue, this polyurethane glue. As it expands around the block in the groove, when I place the block into the diorama, it expands and dries and holds it solid. So here I'm spraying the routered out crevice. These are an inch and an eighth into the diorama. They fit right in there just like that. I put the glue on three sides you can also put a little bit on the end so that when they expand, the foam will ooze through in between and literally make it like one piece of wood which will then attach the plywood to its staples, pop, pop, pop, pop. And this will give us a great surface to hold everything tight rather than just gluing it to the foam and then hoping someday the wood doesn't, the curve doesn't come out and expand and come apart. This way it is just insured that it will stay tight on the diorama. What I'm doing now is I'm cleaning up the dry polyurethane glue and this is what it looks like when it oozes out which means that it's very strong inside there. It's filled all the cavities. This wood's not gonna move and it's gonna hold the plywood in a position real nice. Plywood's been wet. It's easy to curve now and I'm gonna spray it with water bottle and make it really wet. Apply some glue all over the inside after it's trimmed to the shape of the diorama. Just use the same gorilla glue to glue it into place. Now let's make this all wet and just put the piece of plywood, wrap it right around and staple it in place and put all of our staples, make sure they end up right where they belong and it's in the stiff wood that we put in the diorama. I'm gonna pen and I'm gonna draw a line where I wanna cut the plywood and I'm gonna draw the line just a little bit higher than what the scene is because I wanna make sure that I've got enough edge for the dirt and the rock and I'm figuring I'm gonna have a quarter of an inch of added topography when I add the dirt and the rock so I'm gonna add just a quarter of an inch lip higher than the scene when I draw this line with this Sharpie. Take a bead trimmer and trim off the excess after we're finished. It's really important to leave an extra amount right where the water is gonna go because we're gonna fill this creek with envirotex and I wanna have a lip on the plywood to hold that like a dam. So that's all we're gonna do is draw this line all the way around, all the way around here. I make everything wet and now I'm going to put a lot of gorilla glue on this and then use a staple gun to staple staples right into the wood. So this will be attached with glue and with staples. So it's not gonna move. I'm pretty positive this is not gonna move. Just like this. I'm using Minwax Ebony Stain and I took two bottles of HO scale floquel black paint and I used a lacquer based paint. I didn't use water based paint and I mixed it in so that the Ebony would have more of a black blackish tone to it so that the wood grain would completely just be blackened. Now I have to put a second coat on this when it dries. And this is how nice it looks once you get the black stain, two coats of black stain put on the diorama. It gives a very professional finish and now we'll put some coats, about three coats of polyurethane on this and I'm gonna sand between the second and third coat to make it glass smooth and that'll finish off the outside frame of the diorama. There's gonna be no more flexing on this model. So when we build the bridge, everything's gonna be tight and nothing's gonna get broken when the diorama gets moved. So now we've got a great base to build a beautiful scene on top of. I built Highway 160 that takes you on to Hesperus, Colorado and I built this highway using premixed concrete patch mix and what I did was I put down wooden pieces of wood on each side to create forms and then I took out the patching mix and I worked it in real carefully into the forms between the two, just working and blotting and tapping in the cement and then using a water bottle, a spray bottle and water, I take a trowel and I can smooth over the top of the cement giving you that road. Sometimes it's necessary to do two coats because the first coat shrinks just a little bit and you need a little more top coat on that in order to make it perfect. Then what I did in order to give the road color, I came through with some India ink and I liberally brushed on two coats of India ink on top of the cement that's soaked into the cement that gave me just that right color of black top that I wanted for the road. Now the first step with the scenery, now that the sides are done, is to spread the dirt and I use a screen to diffuse the dirt so I can even spread on the scene. And then we'll go over this with rocks. I've got Creek Rock that I've sifted and it's flint and it's got that granite color to it. And we had the vegetation, we had the rock. This'll have the characteristics of the Western Colorado type scenery. It's just like painting, painting with dirt. It's just like we're painting a scene with dirt. Now I'm referring heavily again on the photographs and I'm creating the rock bank on each side of the road, the shoulder on the road. Right now I'm using a lot of limestone, a little flint. It's got a lot of rust in it, a lot of iron in the stone so it gives you that granite looking effect but it's still gonna have that light that the sun plays off of it when it goes outside. So this is gonna look very accurate. I'm taking this piece of foam and I'm just running it along the edge and giving me a nice shoulder so when we spray this with glue we'll have a nice level shoulder on the side of the road. Just like that. Not very much green, this is pretty sparse. They still got a lot of rain there but I'm using Woodland Scenic Scenic Cement to glue everything in place. This is permanent, whatever you get it on it doesn't come off of so I'm prepared with wet rags to wipe the sides down. We've got 16 ounces of material here, two bottles on this. It's not a very big diorama. Now that all the scenery has been glued everything is drying right now I didn't do the final scenery where the trestle's gonna go. I'm gonna put the bents in place where they belong. They should fit just right without any carving right now. I'll put the bents in place and when all the bents are glued in place then I'll go back and I'll finish the gravel work on the shoulder work, the various areas where the trestle comes in where I just didn't wanna put down a lot of dirt yet because I didn't wanna mess up the fit that I've already got pre-carved out. So I'll take all these bents now and I'll start putting them all the way across on the trestle. A lot of today's work's gonna be putting on the cross braces between the bents. It's gonna take hours to do that. After that the last thing to do would be to finish the highway girders and come through and finalize the scenery like I said, come down more dirt, just a little more, just to finalize individual weeds. So that's what I'm gonna do now. I'm gonna install this trestle. It's time to do that. Perfectly in a position here. Every one of them is dropping right in a position and I haven't had to shaving to topography at all, just a little liquid nail underneath and wood glue on top. As you can see, this bridge is just dropping together. Everything's on center, everything's lining up really nice. That's just about gonna ramp this up, just a couple more bents, three more bents and I've got this thing all the way across, set up now in a position where it's starting to look like a bridge. I'm cutting and measuring each individual board that goes in place on the trestle and then I'm notching out the bottom corners, the bottom into squares so that the boards fit, notched, they'll settle down halfway into the 12 by 12. So by cutting off this notch, on the end of the piece of wood here, you can see how it works really well. Now this goes slow, one piece at a time. There's nothing fast about this, but I've worked my way all the way across so far. I've got all of these boards in and they're looking identical to the photographs in the books. I'm not doing anything again without following the photographs exactly the way these cross braces go across. And so far it's looking pretty okay. For the center spans here, I simply took larger pieces of wood, dimensional lumber, I'll put it in the text what size this is and I'm cutting them exactly to size so they fit in between the bents just like that and it looks really good. And then after that gets done, then this piece will fit right inside here perfectly and set right in place once it's glued. And that'll be just perfect for that section right there in the middle, right over where the creek goes underneath the bridge. So there's nothing fast about this, it's tedious one board at a time, there's no magic to it, you just gotta get through it and work your way all the way across your trestle, just like I'm doing on this one here right now. So I'll have this thing wrapped up probably in about six more hours, best guess right now. About six more hours and should be done. Okay, it's taken a little bit more than six hours, I'm actually a couple of days later here, but I've managed to work all the cross braces now, these running boards all the way across three and three and I'm continuing to cut and notch out new boards to put in over here. I've got the sections for the girders cut and the right length to be placed underneath. And I've gotta tell you, the road could be just a little off-center on this. And if it is, I'm gonna rip up this road, which is no big deal, re-pour the concrete, spend an extra two days getting it perfect. Not sure how that's gonna work out, I'm checking the measurements, actually I've got a good idea that it could be off by about a quarter of an inch. Not really that important to most folks, but on this model, I want it to look right. So if I screwed up that part, I'm gonna fix. What's really cool right now is I wired up the track and I've got our first passenger revenue run about the run across the bridge, just because I couldn't stand not being able to watch a train run across this after all the time we've spent working on it. So it works, it's not finished yet. Working on the girder section and finishing off a few more cross braces on the bridge. Additionally, you're gonna start putting bolts across the top and you also drill four holes every 16 foot on center and put bolts on the side. That's something I'm really not in a hurry to do, but I will complete that task at some point on this process also. Here's another important process that I haven't explained and this is rather unorthodox. This is not something that you can read into an article. I had to put all the nut and bolt castings onto the side of the deck. And rather than drill holes on the existing bridge, I was able to do this at the work bench. Now let me walk you through the process of what I essentially did. All right, what I did was I took our existing deck and I laminated it with two additional pieces of wood of the same size. By doing that, I was able to cut each individual board one at a time and then sand them, make sure they fit precisely and centered over each truss. So in the event that your math didn't work and things didn't match up, this is a great way to cover up your mistakes. But after everything's been sanded and perfectly fit, I was able to take these pieces to the work bench, drill holes in them, and then take a little bit of white glue, dip it on the ends of the grant line, castings, the bolts and nut washers and then apply them to the boards. And then once every one of them's been cut, then I'm to the process of where I am now, where I'm gonna start gluing these on all the way across. And it gives me the perfect width of my deck where the overhang of the ties is exactly the way we want it to be. It looks prototypically accurate and matches the photographs. So rather than again drilling all the holes into the bridge on the side part, which would have been very difficult to do without breaking drill bits, take it to the work bench, laminate the sides just like I did on this project. And so far it's coming out just right. Now in order to build the center steel section, I'm relying real heavily on the photographs and the Rio Grande Southern stories, books nine and books 10. And this is simply a project of following the photographs and making everything match. So I'm simply taking evergreen styrene, 14 inch square I-beams, which is the best I can measure. That's what these are in the book. And I am building the, actually these might be 13 and a half, but I'm building the structure piece by piece. That's all you gotta do is simply build it piece by piece. If you're building a prototype model like I'm doing, you just follow the photographs religiously and put the pieces in place. And in order to make these, I took micro-engineering girder sections. I painted them. I actually squared them off at an angle so that they were all adjacent to each other at just a bit of an angle. And then I painted them silver. I trimmed them. I made sure everything fit just right. And then I started painting the uprights and then putting those into place. So a lot of different parts are getting painted silver right now and putting into place. And I'm using a combination of super glue and goo to glue these pieces in place. The goo is actually great because on super glue, the kicker usually affects silver paint and doesn't make it look so nice. So the goo holds up really well if you're very, don't use a lot of it. It works great and it sets up fast. Okay, it's about six hours later and I've got all the cross braces, all the girders, everything in place now, the way it's supposed to be. And I'm gonna have to paint this in place. So what I'm gonna do is mask everything all the way around, pull out the airbrush and very carefully spray this with a silver coat just to paint all the things that haven't been painted yet because it was built in place. Right now it's looking pretty good. Okay, I've essentially got the bridge done and now I'm just finishing up the earth around the bottom of the bridge, the ballast line along the track. And I'm gonna spray it all with a little woodland scenic cement. I've got a bucket full of water here with a wet rag and it's like wipe down the sides in the event that I get glue on the sides. The last couple of things that I do know I need to do on this after this glue dries tonight other than pouring the creek with some resin. I need to run along the whole tops of the trestle and put in four bolts for each one of these 12 foot boards across the tops. There's a lot of bolts that need to be put in. There's no rush on that. This is gonna be an enjoyable project to take my time with. The other thing that I need to do and it's gonna look really dramatic. It'll really add some neat look to this is the Rio Grande Southern had galvanized tin that they put on top of each one of the trestle vents. And I'm gonna use aluminum foil for that. Turn it on its dull side with the dull side shine up. And that should, I've already experimented. That should look pretty good. I'll cut small pieces all exactly the same size and then wrap the tin around the tops of each one of these vents. And it should look pretty darn good. So now I'm gonna start gluing this last bit and get it all finished here. The whole trestle can have glue on it. It's not gonna hurt the wood. It's not gonna hurt the stain. And it'll dry completely clear. So there's not gonna be any issue. If anything else, it'll soak in and make it stronger. I do take the q-tips and I wipe some of the heavy white off the top of the trestle where it shows because that may dry white. And I don't want that to show up at all. Hasn't been really a problem. I'm putting it on very light so I don't blow the ground form away. And I'm getting good soaking of glue on everything so that this is gonna be bullet proof. Now in order to shoot the snow scene that I've got to shoot the Robert Richardson photograph, I'm gonna have to cover all of this beautiful scenery up with plaster to create the snow effect. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take a garden hose when the shoot's done and I'm gonna hose off this whole diorama. You gotta figure it was wet when we built it. It's sealed with woodland scenic cement. It's not gonna hurt the wood. And that's the only effective way to get all of the plaster off after a photo shoot. It should look pretty darn good. So let's let me soak everything real good here with glue. And this diorama will dry for about 48 hours and she'll be ready to shoot. I've still also gotta build the mountains that are gonna go in the background behind the photograph, matching the mountains perfectly. I'll set the camera right up in here into position and trace those mountains onto a piece of foam, carve them out, color them correctly and they'll be the background scenery that belongs in the shot from the camera angle that I'm shooting. So that's pretty much it for now. Let's see how this progresses. This is almost a completed diorama. Now that the bridge is done, it's time to pour our resin for the water. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put the resin on the scale and I'm gonna turn it on and I'm gonna pour the resin part A, part B into the cup, weigh it out. So it's exactly the same. I built the clay dam on the edge here of the diorama that covers the top of the plywood so no resin's gonna get on the plywood. And this is gonna be a very low water, low running creek. So it'll be very easy to work this out and pour this next. Really easy, I'm gonna let it feather out to the sides, paint brush and work it underneath the bridge. This is just resin pouring 101. There's no magic to this. Follow the directions on the package. And the results are always good with this. Use a torch to get the air bubbles out midway through the project and don't burn the bridge down. Any resin on the bridge will play hell to get that off. Now you just touch the flame, just let it lick the top of the water and it takes the air bubbles right out. Really quick, it's not the fire that does it, it's the gas from the fire that destroys the bubbles. I don't know how it works, it's magic. Boom, they're all gone. They'll come back, I'll do this again a second application and notice the bridge isn't on fire and that's a good thing. You don't want to super heat it too warm because once this gets to 125 to 130 degrees it'll start cooking all by itself and it'll literally get hot and start bubbling and work its way out. I've seen it do it on larger river surfaces where it starts out as two inches and it works its way out to 10 inches of super heated resin. It starts bubbling and fuming and you need to get that out of the house because it's probably not good to breathe. But at this point we're good. I'll do one more application with the torch and the water's gonna be done. Where the rocks are where I want a little bit of white bubbles we'll go back with some white paint. We'll figure the direction of the flow of the water which I know is this way and we'll make the appropriate bubbles and suds and the white effect on top of the water to give the effect of running water. The mountains on the bridge scene, I traced the outline of the mountains exactly the way they are in the photograph so that when this diorama is placed up over in front of this kind of scene, this outline of the mountain ranges matches the prototype exactly so that we'll have a good background match. Now it's a snow scene so after I've got the darkened paint color here I'm gonna go over this with some white and just put an outlight of white on this and allow the dark to show through so that it'll give the Apache snow effect that you get in the background on the mountain scene and this will match the photograph to the background so all I've got to really worry about now is creating the effect of cottony snow getting plowed off the trestle. If I pull that off, the whole shot's just gonna fall together and we're gonna get the photograph that we want copying the Bob Richardson's famous photograph of 464 running across Lightner trestle pulling the automotive loads back in 1952 in the early 50s so that's the whole goal of the whole job really that's why we built the whole trestle was for this photograph and we're gonna get there now, we're almost there. And this is where it all comes down, it's photo shoot days, weeks and weeks of working on this bridge and now it's time to cover the whole thing up with blaster to recreate the Richard Robertson shoot that we're about to do. All the building comes down to this very moment right now so let's see how this goes. It's coming out absolutely just right, everything's lining up, the shadows look good, camera angle's good, and there's no wind right now. So everything's just perfect and I know we got the shot. I know just like that we got the shot, little photo shot that she's done and that's how after two hours or two hours of shooting and eight weeks of building this thing, it's finished. So at that point that's all there is, I hope you enjoyed this videotape, thank you very much. Here we are at shoot day, this is a moment where it all comes down to all those months worth of work now get compiled into this very moment. Now we're reproducing the famous Robert Richardon photograph and let me show you how it's laying out. I got cotton that I'm gonna blur out in Photoshop. Here's a shot just the way we want it set up. That's the snow shot. So now that we're done with this, it's time to clean this plaster off of this thing. So I'm gonna vacuum it up and garden hose off this puppy and get it all cleaned back in the house. You gotta figure when we built this diorama we used water to build the entire thing. Everything's sealed, the only way to get this plaster off is to save you about an hour's worth of vacuuming. Now she's just gonna dry, everything's been sealed, the deck is sealed, this is not going to absorb water. This diorama is just fine, it's like being born all over again, just take it back in and she's done. And as you can see the trestle survived its bath. Everything worked out just great and let me show you now, this is what the final photograph looked like. You can see the snow is being plowed by locomotive 464 as it pushes the auto loads across the trestle. It's dusting, it's just falling around the girder section. Everything matches, the sun shadows matches. I think we've pretty much captured the Robert Richardson shot in this photograph and Blackstone models is gonna have a really nice Christmas card for the year 2014. To conclude this video I'm gonna follow up with the research material that I used in order to build Lightner trestle. I relied heavily on Real Grand Southerner this volume nine and 10, the Real Grand Southerner story from Sundance Books. You can find those, there's a 12 volume set of those and you can find those available on eBay or check the Sundance website, they still have copies of various volumes available. A set like that can set you back almost $1,000 but it's worth the research material because it's invaluable, the drawings, everything for the entire Real Grand Southerner and Railroad is in that book. Also, a lot of material I used came from other books. Trails along the Columbine, there's 10 volumes of that set of books. Robert Richardson did a three set volumes of books, Chasing the Narrow Gauge and volumes one and two cover the Denver and Real Grand Railroad and volume three, I use that volume heavily on this as well because that covers the Real Grand Southern and there's some beautiful shots in that book as well on Lightner trestle. So with that, you there's also a follow up article as you can see in Kevin E. Daley's White River Publications, they bought the HON30 annual edited by Chris Lane and in that, not 2014 issue that's coming out, there will be a follow up to the video and to the project of Building Lightner Trestle and photographing it to get the final shot. So there's about 40 photographs in there, how to pictures and text that explain in great detail just like you saw in this video, how to go about building this bridge. So look for that. And with that, I wanna say thank you for watching. That concludes this video on Building Lightner Trestle. Thank you very much. For this segment of What's Neat, I've got Doug Blaine all the way from beautiful Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and being that this is the show that's running up to December 15th, this is considered our Christmas show. And with that Doug, I understand that we're gonna talk about a lot of wonderful Christmas offerings for the viewers out there. We are indeed. Good to be with you again Ken. Yes, for Christmas at Bachman, our saying is that your decorating is not done until there's a train under the tree. So whether it's under the tree, on a tabletop, in a spare room, what have you, we have the train for you. So without further ado, please consider what we're gonna show you for yourself, for as a gift. Always remember it's great to get somebody started in model railroading. So I'm gonna be doing a lot of reaching and grabbing for train sets, what have you. So excuse me if my backs are off screen for a little bit, but here's our first offering. This is a standard in our line. This is the Night Before Christmas large scale train set. I'm gonna try and get it all in frame. Nice. This is fabulous for under the tree. And just a great presence, a great size. It's got the 460 steam locomotive and tender operating headlight, battery operated steam, chuffed, speed synchronized, cold load. And it's got a hopper can put presence in it to run them around the tree and a classic caboose. That's absolutely beautiful. That's what we're gonna start with for under the tree. Of course, any of this works for under the tree. And I'm gonna be jumping back and forth a little bit between train sets and separate sale. But to continue in the large scale vein here, here is our large scale. This is a separate sale locomotive, also a 460. And there we go. That is beautiful. Same features as the one in the sets, except this one in separate sale has all metal valve gear and side rods. It's got metal gears as well. Nice. So it's just an impressive looking locomotive. Great size, takes the knocks. The animals can paw at it and you'll be fine. All right, let's see. So we're gonna move to 0 and 30 now, O scale narrow gauge. I've got a couple of sets to show you there. This one is our Norman Rockwell set. Beautiful. This is a complete ready to run train set. Train, track, power pack. Norman Rockwell, great Norman Rockwell graphics on it. Let's see what's under here. Nice. This has the nickel silver rail with gray roadbed. And about a, let's see, about a three by five track layout. Operating headlight, what have you. Great graphics for Norman Rockwell. Classic Christmas scenes. I can vouch for that one. We've got that one here in the studio. I should have brought it down and put it on the table. Also an 0 and 30 is this is a reversing trolley set. Okay. So this is a point to point system. The street car goes back and forth. You can control the speed. It has a variable stop sign or a stop time rather. And a great engine house to go back into when you're all done for the evening. So, but because this is point to point, it works on a mantle. Yes. So it gives you another option for a train and a space that you wouldn't normally think you could run a train and enjoy some Christmas scenery. Also great for Christmas buildings. The ceramic building sets like department 56. That last set was electric. This one I'm showing you right now is another Norman Rockwell set. This is also a street car set, but this one is battery operated. Very beautiful. And I know who did that photography. Gee, I wonder who that might have been, Mr. Ken Patterson. And you're right. It is beautiful photography. Thank you. So again, battery operated point to point system. So moving on to more HO scale or more sets. These are HO scale. This is our Jingle Bell Express. This has been in line for a while. Great colors, it looks like Christmas. It does. And anyone would be excited to find that under the tree for a present. Yes. All right. And then I'm gonna show you a new set. It's not in just yet. It should be in by the end of this month. This is our another Norman Rockwell set. Nice. Here we go. So that'll be in stock by mid November for sure. Should be the end of this month or definitely by mid November. Right, that's when this video will be coming out. Oh, perfect. Timing is excellent. So again, classic Rockwell illustrations on that set. And then also we would be remiss with not showing our HO scale Thomas set. This is Thomas Slea. Or Thomas Slea, yeah, Santa Slea. And this has a custom Thomas Slea on it. And Thomas with a snow plow. Of course, with our Thomas sets, the HO scale, the eyes move back and forth as it goes down the track. So that's some great animation for the kids. And just a nice fun set as well. And a break fan on the back. Nice dog. That's beautiful. Thank you. All right. Now we have some end scale sets. This is called the spirit of Christmas. This is a passenger set. Okay. There we go there. Nice passenger set with a steam locomotive. Great for smaller spaces, of course, table tops. And then we have a freight set. Also with a steam locomotive. Again, great for the smaller spaces. I don't have to tell you that for end scale. Right. But for decorating opportunities, it just expands if you want to use this strictly as a decoration and not as a full modeled railroad. You've got all the bases covered in all the scales. Absolutely. I'd also like to share with you Ken, our line of separate sale products in all scales as well. So one of our first item, going back to large scale, I'm gonna work my way down then. I already showed you the 460 locomotive. This one is in our fun egg liner offerings. And this is obviously the Christmas egg liner. It's got a nice Santa sleigh on the top with a merry Christmas greeting. Nice. You just have operating flashing headlights and marker lights as well. So from large scale, we have the same in O gauge three rail. Okay. There we go. Same top. Nice. Operating headlights and marker lights. And then also in O gauge three rail is this utility vehicle. With a headlight and it's got a flashing roof light which with a familiar red nose there. That's a beautiful little speeder. I love it. Yeah. Nice and fine. All right. Then from O gauge three rail will go to O and 30. Of course, two rail as well. We have our 260 locomotive. This is not the exact one we have for separate sale. I apologize, but it's similar. To see the exact one, please do check out our website, bachmentrains.com. Don't forget to double end in Bachman. Trains is plural and they're, oops, sorry. That's beautiful, man. We put one of those in the cover of mainline modeler in the very late 90s, early 2000s when you first came out with the Christmas set and I weathered that thing up and it looks so realistic and so beautiful. It doesn't look like a Christmas locomotive. It just looks like a very beautiful painted locomotive. Excellent. Yes, that's always one of my favorite locomotives. I think it's, it is a beauty. All right, and then let's see we have, these are some street cars, again, in O and 30. Okay. This is these greetings. It's got the trolley pole that comes up, spring loaded. And then new for this year, we have a Merry Christmas version. Very nice. Also with the trolley pole, lighted interior, also headlamps as well. So that's available separately. Moving to HO scale, we have our O6O locomotive. There we go. Nice colors, this is standard line, operating headlight with the bandy tender. Nice. All right, slopeback tender. All right, again in HO scale, we have another piece of motive power. This is a classic in our line, it's been around forever, our gandy dancer. Yes. So the pumping action for both Santa and an elf can get that zipping around the track, kids love that one. We have two, we have a box car and a stock car. This is our Claus candy cane company car. It's got the operating door, of course. So you can add that onto a set, add it onto the separate sale locomotive. We have a stock car in HO scale. This one is in our, most of these pieces that I'm showing you are in our, have our North Pole and Southern logo, which is our trademark Christmas railroad name. Nice. I have the reindeer popping in and out of the doors. The windows as it goes around the track, that's nice fun action. And lastly, last but not least, is our end scale separate sale locomotive right there. Terry, very nice, Doug. I'm so impressed at the amount of various models that you have to help our modelers out there, our viewers share the joy of Christmas. That's our goal. And as I mentioned, we didn't show everything. There are some things, everything I showed you is in stock or will be in stock by the time the show airs. There are additional items that will be coming into stock. So again, please do check our website at BachmanTrains.com. Share your enthusiasm, share the spirit of Christmas with these great railroading offerings. And we hope you will enjoy them. Absolutely so true. I wanna thank Lombard Hobbies out of Lombard, Illinois for helping us support this show and all the items that you have seen you can order through Lombard Hobbies. Doug, thank you very much. Fantastic presentation. A pleasure indeed, Ken. All right, buddy. Thank you for, thank you. Let me wish you and yours a very merry Christmas, Doug. And to you, and to yours, and to everyone watching. Thank you. That is awesome. And that it concludes this segment for What's Neat. All the products seen on this episode of What's Neat are available from Lombard Hobbies in Lombard, Illinois or order online at LombardHobbies.com. Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at BachmanTrains.com.