The Klappbrücke (Bascule Bridge) In Husum, Germany

For reasons now unknown to me this post has been sitting in my Drafts folder for quite a while now so I thought I’d get on and publish as it’s actually quite an interesting location.

Husum is a maritime town in the far north of Germany with a pair of modern bascule bridges that look like they’d be good candidates for a bit of scratchbuilding.

View From The Harbour Bridge by Frank Vincentz – Own Work, CC-BY-SA-3.0, View Image

As the bridges are only about 45m long they’d also fit nicely on a module…

As you can tell from the title of this post, I’d originally planned to focus on bridges but it turns out that a number of regional and/or privately operated rail lines converge in Husum so there are plenty of colourful liveries and varied rolling stock which should make a module set here quite interesting to operate.

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The town also has very picturesque historic architecture. Unfortunately, it looks like most of it is some distance from the railway but there’s nothing wrong with using a bit of modellers licence to bring it a little closer though 🙂

The Husum Inland Port by Vanellu’s photo (Cropped by NScaleNotes) – Own work,
CC BY-SA 3.0, View Image

Here’s a map of Husum. The photograph above must have been taken at the end of the dock area that’s roughly in the centre of the map below.

View Larger Map

Here’s a better photograph of the bridge looking towards the centre of town. You can see it’s actually two lifting bridges alongside each other, one bridge to lift the railway tracks and another to lift the road that runs alongside.

Bascule Bridges In Husum by Frank Vincentz – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, View Image

Here’s how the bridges would fit on a range of different modules.

The blue lines represent a single T-Trak module (308mmx355mm), which I think is a bit of a tight fit. The green lines represent a double T-Trak module (616mmx355mm) which is much better as you can incorporate a bit of a run-in on either side of the bridges. The red lines represent the area that could be modelled on my original module design (1050mmx400mm).

There is some vegetation either side of the bridge that could act as a scenic break.

Outer Harbor And Bascule Bridges by Frank Vincentz – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, View Image

Finally, here are some close-ups of the lifting sections of the bridge.

Klappbrücken by VollwertBIT – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, View Image

Klappbrücken an der Gaswerkstraße by Frank Vincentz – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, View Image

Finally, here’s a picture of the very Danish looking harbour area, definitely a candidate for recreation on it’s own module alongside the bridge; if you fancy a holiday after reading this post here’s the Husum tourism website.

Harbour Houses In Husum by Colocho (Cropped by NScaleNotes) – Own Work,
CC BY-SA 3.0, View Image