Canal Lift Bridge
Built by Chris Warrell in January 2016 for the Canals Secretary’s Challenge
This model based on a typical lift bridge found on many narrow canals in Britain, mainly used by farmers to get across the canal. Some are fixed permanently open for canal traffic; others you have to open yourself — hence the chain hanging from the end of one of the beams.
This one is based on the bridges on the southern part of the Oxford Canal which we went on in October 2015. I used a photo from the book Canals in Camera by John Gagg (Ian Allen 1970) to get the details right. The model is approximately 1:24 scale, or ½ inch to 1 foot.
The bridge rolls on a pair of racks, in the real thing normally set into the stone abutment. The real bridge would be predominantly made of timber.