I’ve been a little paralyzed, because I couldn’t figure out how to handle the north end of Corinna scenically — beyond knowing that there would be a large creek with a long, low, curved trestle. But, the two storage tracks had ended up being longer than I had anticipated, and the turntable and engine house also wound up being farther north than I had originally wanted.

Note: There are a lot of images in this post, so the images on this page are pretty small. Clicking on them will open them in large-sized viewer.

Late yesterday, it finally came to me — I’d build a partial retaining wall from locally quarried stone. With a selection of both rigid and flexible stone wall on hand, I set to work. The area that’s shown at right will have a bank sloping down from the bottom of wall to the creek.

Of course, at the ends of the trestle, the rock-work will go all the way down to the creek bed level. But, before the abutments could be placed, the roadbed had to be cut away. To do that, I used a hacksaw blade, cutting up from the bottom until I reached the bottom of the ties. Once the roadbed was gone, there was plenty of room to finish the stone-work.

With most of the stone retaining walls and abutments in place, I started on to the trestle itself. To prepare, I removed the plastic pieces between the ties, so that there would be room to slide the rest of the bridge ties into place. One note here. Pictures of many of the trestles on the Maine two-footers show that the bridge ties look to be the same as regular ties, simply placed closer together.

To built the trestle, I started with two curved stringers aligned beneath the rails. To make installation a little easier, I pre-curved them while they were still slightly damp from being stained. I waited until the stain was pretty much dry, and then spread a very thin layer of clear Elmer’s glue along the top edge. The curved pieces were then inserted into notches that had been previously cut into the top of the abutments, moved into position and clamped. While the glue was still wet, the extra ties were slid into place between the molded plastic ties.

I’m now working on the trestle bents which, like the prototype, are of a very simple design — three pilings beneath a single support, with a pair of diagonals to provide some rigidity. There will be nine of these bents on the bridge, spaced approximately every eight scale feet. Once all the bents are in place, there will be additional diagonal braces set between each bent.

The result will be a trestle similar to this one on the Bridgeton & Saco River.

By the way, you may have noticed the “clothespin” clamps in a couple of the pictures. And, you may have thought, “I thought this was an O-scale layout. Either those clothespins are really small, or that’s one helluva big trestle!” Well, you’d be right — they’re half-size clothespins! I’ve been searching for small clamps for several months now, and couldn’t find anything that satisfied me, until now. The coin is a U.S. Quarter, so you get an idea of the size. They’ve got a decent grip, but aren’t so strong as to crush basswood or balsa parts.

I finally made it back down to the basement tonight to get some work done on the layout — there’s only a couple of weeks until the Corinna module have to go on the road again. In the process (and over the past few weeks, really), I’ve come to a couple of conclusions:

• I really don’t like working with foam for scenic forms. I’m going back to nice, easy, conventional scenery techniques.
• After the trip to Hickory in September, I’ll go back to carrying one of the “standard” module sets.
• The rest of the layout will be built using more “conventional” construction. It’s not going “on tour,” so why bother with light- or medium-weight modular construction when “chunks” will do.

Why fly in the face of the “new order” in scenery and go away from foam? Basically, there are a couple of ways to shape foam — hacking and grinding, or hot-cutting. Hacking and grinding is messy, and hot-cutting will kill you.

And, there are 24 feet of unused module just hanging around, doing nothing except taking up space.

Anyway, I’m feeling woozy from the foam fumes, and it’s past my bedtime. More later, when I can form a more coherent thought.