Posted this on GSM; putting it here for those of you who don’t drop in there. There’s a section in the back yard where the line passes near some well-established trees. Like many Australian natives, their roots run shallow, and we were particularly keen to avoid doing anything that might damage them. The solution was a short bridge made out of plastic PC stands. We’d taken delivery of over 100 machines early in 2004, and deployed them as desktops. We’d never even opened the boxes containing the stands that allowed the PCs to be mounted in tower configuration, and the Maintenance Manager wanted them gone. Most went into the skip, but a few found their way to our shed.
The four PC stands that comprise the bridge are joined underneath by two steel rails that were originally screwed to a wall as supports for variable-height shelf brackets. Now that 75% of our children have left home, there is a lot less need for bookshelves! The bridge is supported by a brick at each end, concreted into the ground (these aren’t visible in the photo). The area under the bridge is the original level; we built up on each side, more so on the left because the yard falls away in that direction. The honeycomb structure of the stands’ undersides means detritus from the trees collects there. The photo, below, shows what happens. Subsequently, we’ve changed the orientation of the switch as part of a bigger project to extend the bridge, but that’s another story.
Not constructing a bridge at all, just building up the entire area in front of the trees with sand, was an option. We went for the bridge because it added interest to the railroad for very little cost. The only expense we incurred was for the ten-dollar bag of premix used to pour the anchors for the support bricks.
