Cheap Girder bridge

Ever since I started WW2 wargaming, I've liked the idea of a bridge as an objective or focus for a game - I suppose inspired by the films A Bridge Too Far and The Bridge at Remagen.

That said, a bridge scenario isn't something for every game and I didn't want to pay railway scenery prices for something that would only get occasional use. I was pleased therefore to find laser cut MDF girder bridge sides at very modest prices on Ebay and I ordered a pair of, 200 mm long at the bargain price of £2.45, including shipping.

I wanted to be able to position the bridge anywhere along my river sections so that meant having no reinforcement at table-level, potentially making a one-piece bridge very fragile. At the same time, I didn't want to just rest the bridge on the ramps, allowing movement and obvious gaps. The solution was to use some small magnets and a key and socket arrangement to locate them together.

The bridge deck was made from two layers of 3mm MDF with plasticard  underneath to create the appearance of an I-beam along the edges and the end pillars were from more offcuts of MDF

I stuck these onto MDF bases and made the sides of the ramps from mounting card, filled in with more offcuts and smoothed over with repair plaster - this dries quickly without sagging or adding excessive moisture to the base materials.

The bridge pillars were done in the same way as my Italian Wars buildings, with card rectangles to represent the stones and a watery mix of filler and PVA for texture. The ground was textured as I usually do for scenery and bases. 

The picture below shows a Skytrex 15mm Churchill for scale and a section of river, undercoated - getting the river colours right is a whole other story, not yet resolved. This picture hi-lights the dilemma of wargames rivers, with the conflict between model scale and rules ground scale. In model scale terms, this is only just big enough to look like a river, rather than a stream that could be jumped by the average soldier or driver across by any AFV but, at 150 mm wide, it takes up a lot of table space.

I airbrushed the bridge itself with various shades of blue-grey, from dark to lighter and dry-brushed the roadway with a light stone colour over my usual scenery brown-grey emulsion base coat. Finally I added static grass and tufts with some clump foliage to represent bushes growing on the sides of the ramps.