James May’s Bridge
Built by Chris Warrell in January 2010
This is my attempt to recreate the bridge that James May walked over in the 2009 BBC TV programme James May’s Toy Stories.
A version was built by Chris Shute and featured on Spanner. Having looked at his design, I then tried to forget what it looked like so as to come up with my own design. I do remember that he used braced girders, so there is a similarity there. I can’t remember the other details of his model, other than it was powered. My model is hand operated, but I might try to add motors to it later.
The main girder sections are made from angle girders with flat girders top and bottom to form a box girder. Red double-braced girders are used for the bascule section while green open-ended braced girders are used for the swing section. This is due to shortage of red parts. I could have done the whole thing in yellow, but would have had to double them up to give the double-braced effect.
The bridge main section is 1:12 scale, the original being 24½” deep by 14” wide. The length of the original bridge was 23 metres (75’) so my model should be 6’3” long, but it is actually about 31” long.