BOX TRUSS BRIDGE AND STONE ABUTMENTS
Manufacturer: Lone Star Bridge and Abutment Co., 901 Oak View Court, Arlington, TX 76012. Price: 24-Inch Box Truss Bridge $65.00 (includes shipping); 9-Inch Number 2 Piers $35.00 ea.; Number 2 Jointer Abutments $25.00 ea.
LET'S START WITH the bottom line: Lone Star's workmanship and materials are superb. Not excellent--superb. And the products are beautiful They would be as much at home in a glass case on your mantle as spanning a chasm on your layout. Let's also realize they are models of no particular prototype and essentially artist's renderings; they are not to exact scale. Still, Lone Star's bridges and stonework castings are consistent with all but the most precise large-scale train manufacturers' products.
Lone Star's owner, Mark Smith, builds each piece himself. He hand crafts the bridges from kiln-dried, pressure treated blonde mahogany and uses 1/16-inch brass rod for the metal bracing. The 24-inch Box Truss sample we received uses 52 beams, timbers, and planks along with 34 brass tension rods. Mark says the bridge is strong enough to sit on (he static tests them with a 150 pound mid-span load) but he prefers you use a chair.
The piers are high tensile strength, exterior grade (weatherproof) gypsum cement castings. Mark designs them so you may use them individually or stack them. The piers come as "upper" and "lower" modules, each in a choice of 3-, 6-, 9-, or 12-inches high.
The largest stones in the pier bodies scale out to about 12 inches high by 17 inches wide in 1:22.5 scale and about 17 by 27 inches in 1:32 scale. The corner stones are about 20-percent larger--fairly massive in 1:32 but credible. The minimum width is about 6 1/2 actual inches and the depth about 3 actual inches. Our castings were free of flaws or chips, they fit together well, and the simulated joints were crisp and realistically deep. They would look very real after a few months outdoors.
The bridge was gorgeous. The wood-to-wood joints were perfect. The wooden parts were dead level, smooth, and crisp. Mark even plugged the tiny nail holes with filler and sanded them so smooth I could find them only under extremely close scrutiny. As I mentioned, the bridges are not scale models; their construction is simplified compared to a real box truss and Mark has beefed up the dimensions to withstand the elements.
One last item: Mark's packaging alone qualifies as an art form. Each casting comes boxed in its own molded foam cradle, as does the bridge. And the foam even has a skin over it to avoid those little bits of Styrofoam we seem to find clinging to so many things.
If you want a superdetailed bridge or stonework to reflect a particular prototype and precise dimensions, you'll probably have to build it yourself. If you want an extremely attractive and rugged bridge of superb quality, consistent with the appearance and level of detail of most out-of-the-box large scale trains, Lone Star's bridges and abutments will absolutely delight you.
