Subject:
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Ponte Vecchio - Elevated Road Bridge Over Rail
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.town, lugnet.trains
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Date:
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Fri, 12 Nov 1999 07:53:54 GMT
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Viewed:
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1131 times
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"Ponte Vecchio"
The idea of building a model of my home village of Kew Gardens (New York) has
been growing on me for quite some time. It is a diverse lot of residential
styles including Anglophile medieval half-timbered houses, bits of castles,
Jazz
Age art deco, stucco, and the barn-shaped Dutch Revival house. It ranges from
single dwellings to apartment towers. Furthermore it contains a railroad
station, post office, two fire companies, and a major hospital, so it would be
a
very full and challenging Lego Town inspiration.
Now I am buying my apartment so I have been learning more about the history and
architecture. Around the 1910 train station are some very interesting bits of
the village, where a bridge was constructed over the new railroad to keep the
east and west village halves in contact. Over time three other road bridges
were
put up nearby, but the best construction was a 1930 pair of "Ponte Vecchio"
contrivances which elevated shops, restaurants, and houses out and over the
rails, making the railroad disappear and seamlessly uniting the village.
In real life, the amazing thing is that the buildings are actually steel cages
suspended from a bridge at roof-level! This is so that, with a peak of 100
trains passing daily, the structure is able to withstand the vibration. It
follows the same principle used in medieval Venice to hang shops out over
waterways without depending on pilings that could be destroyed by flood,
therefore the trick is named after the original "Ponte Vecchio".
I had been calculating the dimensions of a model of this street and have
settled
on a 32x32 straight road plate for the road bridge over the track, with 16x32
bases for shops also elevated to the road level. The 9x32 margins of the (old-
style!) roadplate would be sidewalk, or might be eliminated by overlapping the
plates.
On either end, a gentle slope would be required, so other 32x32 roadplates
might
lean-to on the bridge top. In real life, buildings march along the downward
sloping sidewalk. This makes for some odd-shaped thresholds on their doors! At
one end of the ramp is a pizza restaurant with very steep steps inside between
the bar and the dining room. Behind this restaurant is a train boarding
platform
which would call for the standard 2-brick high pre-fab loading platform. At the
other end of the bridge, the shops also march down the slope--but there is an
opening where cement steps (now buckling) lead sharply down to a mid-level
trackside cafe and this path continues to bleed off altitude with interruptions
of a step or two at a time. A series of back doors to shops or apartments
follows the sidewalk level down to the ground where finally there is a broad,
flat railroad station and parking lot.
Did I mention the riot of peaks and gables that roof it all? It would call for
a
barrage of inside and outside corners, a perfect job for the new black roof
packs. (Although in real life the wood shingles are dark brown.)
Fortunately this mess of mixed elevations is mostly rectangular in its layout.
Other interesting bits of the village close by give challenging non-rectangular
problems: "flatiron" buildings on wedge-shaped parcels of land between
intersecting roads. But one thing at a time!
Back on construction: If I install a road plate that is tilted upward at one
end, then I could construct buildings upon 1x2 brick hinges (or other hinge
types) angled to establish a level. I am not sure the math would work out
neatly. The seam could be hidden by a raised sidewalk snapped to the slanting
surface of the roadplate.
Alternately, without using any plate underneath--after all the real life "Ponte
Vecchio" is a suspension bridge--I could construct the buildings to hang from a
rafter beam and secure the sloping road surface to their lower edge with
Technic
pegs. Or not secure it, and have the road plates rest on a framework of Technic
beams. Maybe the real world solution is the best one for the model, too!
The new sloped roads in 2000 City Centre got me thinking on this. I don't
believe those pre-fab ramps are perfect (no control over the grade!) but I am
not ruling them out.
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