Continuation.
The landscape has become visible. I'm nearly done with this phase.


Above an overview and below the upper end of the creek.

Above, the lower end of the module, below, an overview.

Detail of the road entering the module. It makes a right hand turn, descends, crosses the creek and makes a left hand turn before going under the bridge.

On october 13 I was at it again, with my less than trusty hot glue gun. Somehow a lot of glue sticks went in but not a lot of very hot glue drops came out at the other end... Did I mention that it hurts (for a short period of time) when hot glue lands on your finger instead of on a cardboard strip?

Slowly the landscape becomes clear. In the picture below you can see that the strips were to long and interfering with each other.

Below, the web for the lower half of the module is nearing completion.

Above is a close-up of the future road climbing back up and to the right the creek bed can be seen .


An overview of the module as seen along the future railroad track.

This was the progress on the eleventh day of october 2009. At first I struggled a bit with visualizing how this module would look. The inspiration came from a two-dimensional picture, was tossed around in my head for a few months and then I had to somehow get it out of my head to build it.

In th picture above you can see the subroadbed for the railroad going from left to right. The subbase for the creek is from right bottom to left top. Finally, the road goes from left bottom, across the creek, dips below the bridge and goes up again to exit right top.

In the picture below, all cardboard strips have been glued to the plywood. That was not the smartest thing I did. The strips are longer than needed and overlap the subroadbed for the railroad and thus interfere with each other when weaving the web. As can be seen in the picture at the bottom.

Welcome & inspiration

Welcome to my second blog about building Fremo America-N modules.

This second module, 50 cm in length, was actually the first to be operational. It passed the ultimate test, being used in a Fremo-meeting (this one in Lauffen, Germany in 2009:http://www.fremo-net.eu/index.php?id=168&L=6 ). Find the little purple square that is the end of a short branch. My module is the one that is adjacent to it. You can also see it in the picture as a white blot. I completely forgot to take a picture...

Here I will document its building and use in modular meets.

The inspiration came from a Kalmbach book about bridges written by Jeff Wilson: The Model Railroader's guide to bridges, trestles and tunnels (ISBN 0-98024-586-7, see the website http://www.kalmbachstore.com/ for availability ).
You can find a picture by Jim Shaughnessy on page 27 of that book. It is of a ballasted deck girder bridge of the New York Central railroad somewhere in Ohio, USA.

What is a ballasted deck girder bridge? Well, it is a bridge with longitudinal vertical plates as the main support. On top there is a concrete through to hold the ballast which carries the track.

The prototype is not unlike this bridge but has a pier to the right of the road:
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=315710

Oh, and the name? It is named after my father, Stein, who helped me with the woodwork.