Trestle – Not Your Average Engineer

After last week’s adventures in building a cabin, I decided to build a railroad trestle in N scale suitable for a Nn3 train at some point in the future. It came out pretty good all things considered.

This is a three part trestle with some standard single height trestle bents (scale 15 feet tall) and a bridging section that might be found spanning a chasm.

When installed on a model railroad layout, there would be some earthwork for the single span bridge at both ends and also some abutments at either end of the trestle. But for now in the absence of a layout to put this on, here is the current product.

A few in-progress photos to show how I laid up each bent of the regular trestle sections. Then some construction photos of how I did the single span bridge in the middle.

This trestle was constructed based loosely on a bunch of different trestles that I found photos of online. The photos I’ve seen are mainly of big, impressive trestles. It is harder to find photos of smaller trestles like this would have been. The smaller, regular and very average trestles weren’t noteworthy enough back in the day to waste much film on.

I’m not sure what i’ll build next out of twigs from the yard. I am starting to run out of straight twigs that are the right size for building things. I might have to go further afield to find new construction materials.

Tag: Trestle

Building a trestle in N scale for a future Nn3 layout