Viaduct

One of the charms of T-gauge is being able to model big infrastructure items like bridges. And one of the problems with T-gauge is the scale you are working in... tiny tiny tiny. Luckily, as things get smaller, details become invisible without any loss of visual effectiveness.
To date I've been experimenting with Scalescenes scratch building texture prints, printed onto card and paper. Now, the requisite thickness of card and size of structural items means a structure built solely from card in T-scale would not have sufficient strength, and the alignment of components would inevitably go awry. The simplest solution is first to build a sub-structure from balsa and paper texture prints to the balsa - the paper immediately and easily taking the form of the balsa. A resultant 12-arch brick viaduct is pictured below.

Balsa-paper viaduct with HST.

The balsa form for the viaduct was drilled using a 25mm drill bit and a craft knife was used to create the piers from these holes. Texture printed card was glued to outer faces of the structure and a (very) sharp craft knife was used to cut away the spans. Separate strips of texture printed card were glued to the inner faces of the arches / spans. Finally, to mask the gaps between the outer face and inner face card, thin strips of texture printed paper (mimicking brick voussoirs in this case) were folded  (and to permit the bend around the arch, cut perpendicularly to one edge of the fold) and glued in place.

Voussoir detail of the arches.

Some remaining details still need to be added to the viaduct. The track is to have cess ballast added, which will (intentionally) raise the height of the cess to near-level with the viaduct wall. So naturally, some fencing needs to be added and luckily EMA model supplies do a small range of etched brass products in 1:500 scale. In the photos you may be able to see small grey protrusions from the outer faces - these are anchor points for future electrification structures. And finally, the (stone) foundations for the viaduct piers will be added when it is finally glued into position on the layout.