1/35 Arnhem bridge diorama WIP

Quite the undertaking! :+1:

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@metalhead85 some if the best dioramas are the ones where it’s one building, tons of figures and a vehicle or two. But it all makes sense, the figures are perfectly aligned for the scene and everything adds depth.

I would loved to have seen that ! Great pics

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AFAIK there has been made little use of yellow bricks in the modern age in the Netherlands. They are mostly red…
But the pillars were constructed from concrete with a layer of grey stone around them.



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@golikell i may have to go with a more grey then. I don’t think there’s any colored photos from the 40s, unless when they did upgrades to the bridge they kept with its traditional style of build.

I have been looking into this for you, and they took great care to rebuild the bridge as close as possible to the original. After all natural stone is much more durable than bricks.
I know the following page is in Dutch but Google translate might come in handy here. It gives an extensive description of the bridge and its history.
https://rheindex.ultramarin.nl/KM/kmx/architektur/bruecken/br_g_88286.html

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Yellow bricks are common in houses from around the late 1960s through perhaps the ’90s, though red was also used a lot in that period. Houses built before are usually from red brick (but not bright red), and more modern ones are frequently as well.

For pillars of bridges this big, though, I also doubt brick would have been used at all.

Also, there’s the road surface on the bridge itself. As discussed earlier this year on the TWENOT forums, it was almost certainly paved with wooden blocks about the size of bricks. This is the very similar Waal bridge at Nijmegen being paved, showing what that would have looked like:

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Good addition! The Rijn bridge was built in the beginning of the 20th century, so that would be before the yellow brick fashion. I must confess that I never heard about wooden paving for roads.

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It wasn’t unique to Holland. Parts of Liverpool docks were paved with them. My late uncle said they were lethal to ride a motorbike on when wet. They absorbed the oil dropped by motor vehicles and worn rubber on the surface meant it was like ice.

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Indeed: it was clearly also used in Gelderland.

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Don’t confuse them! :wink::stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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@golikell thank you for the article, I’m going to open it up in the computer to get the translate to work.

@Jakko that’s an interesting method of paving a road. To be honest I’ve never heard of that method at all. I always assumed it was just cement or asphalt in some capacity.

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Neither had I, and it would be very hard to tell the difference in photos, especially black-and-white ones. Even in the photo above, it just looks the chap is laying bricks instead of wood blocks.

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@Jakko can we make the assumption that there was a light covering of asphalt?

As far as I understand it: no :slight_smile: The wood was the road surface. They put a layer of bitumen down and stuck the blocks into that while it was soft, which is what you can see the man in the picture of the bridge doing. Once the bridge was fully paved in wood and the bitumen had hardened, it was ready for use.

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@Jakko the more i build the more i learn about engineering. Sounds like a black color for the road then rather then my previous plan for grey.

I do understand that a layer of (coarse) sand was present, which shows quite clearly on one of the pictures taken after the battle…

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Very cool, I will be following this closely!

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@golikell interesting, sand? I wonder how that came up. I could probably use some ammo mig gust to replicate sand pigments.

Obviously against the slipping on the slippery wood…

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