Communications

I have used this title to cover the man made communications of roads, bridges and fords.  Since no model terrain of any of these existed when I began wargaming, I have made my own.

Roads

My early roads were strips of card, but a few years ago I replaced them with a modular road system, which was painted onto cut up vinyl.  We had had a set of cloth backed vinyl table mats which my wife was going to throw out, so I recycled them to make my roads.  There are long and short straight sections, cross roads, T-junctions, angled junctions and angled cross-roads.  The roads are all 30mm wide.

Because they are vinyl, they are flexible and follow the contours of the ground.  I painted them on the vinyl side with a light dirt colour, green edges and a darker brown lines to represent ruts made by the wheels of vehicles.

Here are some roads curving over the terrain in a wargame of Albuera.

 

Bridges

My original bridges were all made as wooden bridges from model railway planking, with sides from model railway fencing.  I have some smaller ones to cross streams, and larger ones to cross small rivers.

More recently I have made a number of stone bridges, all with archways.  These are designed to fit into my rivers, so giving a natural look to the bridge, rather than it being raised artificially high.

Fords

 

I made these many years ago.  They are simply pieces of clear plastic, with a few gravel chippings on the side of them to delinate the ford.  They can be placed at any point in my 3″ wide rivers.