A bridge too far?

I hope you don't mind my rather pathetic title for this post but honestly no matter how hard I tried nothing wittier sprang to mind.

Fallschirmjäger crossing a river near Monte Cassino - May 1944

Something this blog (and my collection in general) sadly is woefully lacking is terrain. So over the last weeks I sat down and decided to try my hand on one of those essentials no terrain collection is ever complete without. A river it had to be...

... and as no river is ever complete without any means for your precious toy soldiers to cross without getting their feet wet a bridge was needed as well.

The bridge was made using several layers of Styrodur and came out quite well if I say so myself. Especially considering it being my first major hand crafted terrain piece ever.
I opted for a rather generic look, thus allowing me to use it from the Roman period up to present day and in almost any theatre without too much of a stretch.

Of course not everything went to plan and I made several mistakes during the whole process. First among those was me using thin card board as bottom layer for the first few test pieces resulting in noticeable warpage. I addressed this issue by using plasticard for the bridge piece.

Unfortunately I also messed things up when pouring the water effect resulting in lots of tiny bubbles in the river bed. These are only visible on close inspection though and shouldn't be too obvious on normal gaming distances. All in all I learned quite some lessons during this built and for once I actually enjoyed it.

To round out this post here's two small shots of my Fallschirmjäger cautiously crossing the bridge under cover of armour...

No "Silver Whistle"-ish panorama views I'm afraid. The missus objected to me clattering up the kitchen table for the photo session.