My method of building tunnels and bridges

I bought myself some vac formed tunnel mouth parts, and decided that instead of glueing them to a piece of wood as you are supposed to that I would fill them with plaster, but then a second thought decided that plaster may be a little bit brittle so cement was used instead.

Here the moulds were filled with mortar and a similar shape piece of wood attached to the top to ensure that when the mortar was dry I could pull it off and attach it with contact adhesive more securely onto the flat mortar.

Now when the mortar was completely dry the wood was pulled off and reattached with contact adhesive, and here we can see the whole lot being assembled with clamps and using PVA wood glue the whole lot then placed on thick cardboard

Now to fill in the unsightly gap between the wing wall and main tunnel mouth body, and here I used a very thin wash of mortar applied with an old paintbrush and bit of stick.

Allowing this to dry it was time give the whole lot a coat of water and PVA mix to a ratio of 30/70 respectively . This will seal in any loose bits of mortar.

Now it was time to make it look like a tunnel and I did this by using more thick cardboard and this is double thickness cardboard.

When the shell was constructed I fitted some stone embossed plasticard to the internal walls and gave them a coat of primer and sealed any gaps with some mastic.

Painting

I had to apply some tan colour over the grey primer first, then picking out a few stones in different colours like black, brown dark tan but not oo many it will result in overkill.

A nice happy medium is all that is required.

To finish off some dark wash was applied all over, this toned down some of those bright colours very nicely

Ending

It is really easy to produce just exactly what you need by using this method, below can be seen a disused bridge that has also been built this is to enable me to slope the scenery down to the bottom rear corner and will feature a disused railway line running on the top embankment. ... well that is until it reaches the derelict bridge that is.

Enjoy the rest of the pictures and have fun building.

Best wishes Chris Russell.