Bridges and Viaducts
The real Yosemite Valley Railroad had almost as many bridges as miles. In the 77 mile run from Merced up to El Portal, the entrance of Yosemite National park, the YV RR had 68 bridges and crossed the Merced River numerous times.
On a small layout, that would be pretty hard to duplicate. So selective compression once again has to be done. I knew I wanted the Barrett Bridge. It's a huge 2 Warren Truss bridges were the highest in the west for their day. They went over the Exchequer Dam water project.
It was going to take some time to build these monsters so I built some molds and cast a 250' stone viaduct where trains could pass underneath and on top. I added some moss and foliage on it and weathered it mildly also.
Miracles happen ... a good friend of mine named Mel, is moving and when he tore down his layout gave me a lot of his buildings and things. Low and behold, in the box were 2, 100+ foot Warren Truss bridges. Ohhhh, dreams do come true! Thanks Mel, that saved me hours and hours of work. So out the old stone viaduct bridge went and with some modifications and rebuilding, the two new Warren Truss's are in place and look great. You can see the pics below.
Now, the Exchequer Bridge area I needed an even bigger viaduct to allow double tracks on top and a crossover. I'm sure there isn't a prototype for this (double crossover on a bridge) but it was the only straight area on the layout long enough to put a double crossover. The double crossover is needed to allow trains to go either direction. I found early on that without it, once a train headed in a certain direction, there was no way for it to return the other way, hence the double crossover.
Other smaller bridges spanning the Merced will be built shortly and placed.
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