Building the railroad bridge and tracks

I had to build a 36" section of railroad track so the train would have something to sit on and the plans showed exactly how to build the rails and railroad ties.  That part of it was time consuming, but pretty straight forward to build, but I wanted someway to display the locomotive other then just setting on the track on a shelf.

So I decided to design and build a bridge that could be used simply by sitting on a shelf as a display for the locomotive or it could be used as a display shelf within itself.  There's a french cleat under the back side of the bridge to allow it to be hung on a wall. (In fact, that's the way my father displayed it).

I found the pole lights in a hobby shop, so mounted and wired those along the back side of the bridge.

 

 

 

 

Now that I've decided to build a couple passenger cars, a coal hopper and caboose, I will need a lot more track and "where" and "how" to display the whole train has created a new set of challenges.

So here's my idea; this is a picture of our bed headboard.  It's 10ft. wide with the light bar being about 4 inches lower then the two outside towers.  Not that the bridge for the train was originally designed to sit between the towers, but the bridge turned out to be 4 inches high, so it could work out perfectly to run the train across the entire width of the bed.........but that would be too simple!

I thought it would be neat to make the track curved coming off the left end of the bridge and have the track turn back towards the wall and have the track curve the opposite coming off the right end of the bridge and turn towards the front of the right tower.  With the train being over 10 foot long when completed, this would give me the length I need to display the entire train on top of our headboard.

I've got a couple more ideas for this project but will cover them another time.  I've been working on the curved track, so will talk about that phase of the build in my next blog.