Road bridge

I decided the first structure to be built for the railway would be the road bridge, which in the real world carries the Purley Way. After looking at a number of LBSCR bridge designs, I decided to build a generic bridge based on common features rather than a specific one. There are no photos of the original bridge at Waddon just a blurry glimpse in the background of a station shot. As what could be seen was the typical southern region abutment I decided to use that as a starter and to flank them with curved supporting curtain walls which were quite common. For the centre section I opted for the Wills riveted bridge panels as the blurry photo showed a similar iron centre section.

Construction started with the four abutments as I needed these to be as indetical as possible to avoid any sloping or twisting of the bridge. Doing this first allowed me to cut all the panels at the same time, ensuring they were the same shape and size. Once the carcasses were completed I clad them with Slaters brick card and connected them with a centre section and the iron panels.

Next came the supporting curtain walls. These were quite tricky as they not only slope downwards but are curved horizontally as well. I started with the vertical shape of the wall and initially cut this as a straight line, however I soon realised this needed to be a downward curve. Once the vertical shape of the wall was sorted I then had to deal with the horizontal curve. After various experiments with cardboard I cut four formers from plastic and glued them to the base of the walls. However, after gluing the former to the base of the walls it became apparent this was causing them to twist. The remedy was to add vertical formers to the back of the walls to keep them upright and square. 

This left just the detail of the capping stones and pavements. The abutment stones were a straight forward square of plastic with the edges chamfered but the curved walls caused yet another problem. I rounded the edges of a plastic strip to represent the black engineering bricks but when it came to glueing it in place it just wouldn't sit on the wall because of the downward and outward curves of the wall. This meant cutting the strip in a chopper and applying the resulting bricks one by one over a couple of very tedious hours.