“I have put my heart and soul into my work, and lost my mind
in the process”
-Van Gogh
Over the past three weeks, whilst procrastinating doing
university work, I have been engaged in building this…
That is a model of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Minecraft. I
built it on SkyServers, a Survival with economy and perks server based in
Melbourne, where I am a member of the staff team. You can join the server here:
sky-mc.net.
I’ve built several smaller Harbour Bridge-esque bridges before, but none at anything close to 1:1 scale. For the SkyServers Build Of The Month competition (where the theme ever January is “Australia Day”) I decided to build a Harbour Bridge much bigger than anything I’ve done before. The result is the build you see in these pictures.
You’ll notice that no screenshot contains the entire bridge
– part of it is always unrendered. This is because SkyServer’s chunk rendering
is fixed at six to reduce lag and the bridge is simply too long to fit into one
frame.
In this article, I’ll be examining a few bits of the bridge
in more depth than I can in either of the submissions I’ve entered the bridge
into, as well as some of the aspects of it. So, strap yourself in for a trip
around one of the world’s most famous bridges!
The first thing I built was the pylons. These are built out of sandstone, obviously. Each pylon is around 30 blocks tall with a 9-block wide arch to accommodate the road, walkways, and railway line and all four feature a stone-brick building on the top (as in real-life). When built, the pylons were purely decorative, and remain so on my build – it would hardly be the Sydney Harbour Bridge without them!
The Arch
The arch itself is built from blackstone, introduced in the
1.16 Nether update. I lost count of how many stacks I went through – at least
sixty.
The arch is around fifty blocks wide, one-hundred and ninety
blocks long (roughly equivalent to three 64-block stacks) and around sixty
blocks tall (from deck height). The two arches (upper and lower) have stone
paths running along them to allow players to participate in a Bridge climb,
just without the safety harnessing! Each arch is connected by X beams (as in
real life) and features hinges at ground level – these are considerably smaller
than in real-life but represent the actual ones.
Blackstone blocks, walls, stairs and slabs were used in the
building of the arches, X beams and the hangers.
The streetlights are represented by sea lanterns as these looked most realistic. Every second hanger on the railway side features wire supports for the overhead electric wires to power the trains. The ones on the road side would have served in this function if I’d incorporated tram lines onto the bridge, as there were prior to 1958, but the bridge is built akin to its 2010s appearance, so the tram lines have long since been replaced with traffic lanes.
The top of the bridge features two flags, just like the real
one. These banners were outsourced from another player. The Aboriginal Flag and
Scottish Saltire are featured. Neither are regularly flown from the real bridge
(normally, it’s the Australian flag and the NSW flag – the Aboriginal flag has
been flown from the bridge in the past) – these two proved easier to make.
The Aboriginal flag is understandable – the Scottish Saltire is here simply
because I love all things Scottish and it’s a simple yet powerful flag.
Is that a plane? Yes, but we’ll get to that later…
The Deck
As in real-life, the deck features a cycle path, a
double-track railway line, a major highway and a footpath. The railway lines
are built to my three-block gauge, with the rails constructed from basalt,
another 1.16 addition. The road lanes are constructed from dark grey and white
concrete and the walkways from diorite. The entire deck is around fifty blocks
wide and about 210 blocks in length. One concession I made to stop the deck
from being excessively wide was that only six road lanes are included, rather
than eight.
To populate the bridge, a total of thirty-four vehicles were
spread across the six lanes. Several of these vehicles, notably the cars and
vans, are duplicates of a handful of “master” designs, but in unique colour
schemes, so that no vehicles appear twice. The only exception to this is the
two Sky BusLines buses, which carry the same livery, but these feature subtle differences between
them.
As with most of my builds, several vehicles are references
to popular culture. Things to look out for include:
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| A London AEC Routemaster Bus with Beatles drummer Ringo Starr as the conductor. The biggest vehicle on the bridge and probably my favourite. |
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| The Wiggles Big Red Car. Difficult to build accurately as there isn't a straight edge on the well-known variant of the car |
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| The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour bus from the TV film of the same name |
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| Jupiter 999, the fire engine from Fireman Sam, constructed as a mashup of its original 1987 (S1-S4) and 2005 (S5) appearances. This is the second version of Jupiter I’ve made; the original was smaller to fit into a restrictive garage and more akin to the original 1987 truck. |
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| The Melon Mobile, requested by fellow staff member SSnazz |
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| The PuffMobile, at the request of fellow staff member DLemr |
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The Ford Anglia from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. This was a replacement for the Knight Bus, as the latter proved too tall to fit on the bridge. |
The Minegara
It wouldn’t be a built from me without a train now, would
it?
As this is the Sydney Harbour Bridge, one of my London
Underground trains would not fit the bill here. Instead, I designed a new
train, based on the Tangara train in service with Sydney Trains. The train is
built mostly from polished andesite, concrete, and various woods. The train on
the bridge is the MineGara V2 – V1 was too big and never made it
past my single player test world.
Building a double-decker train inside of a 7x7 loading gauge
proved a challenge – this is the biggest the Minegara could have been.
However, I managed it and am very pleased with the result, so much so that the Minegara
might be my favourite Minecraft train I have built to date.
 |
| One of the carriage vestibules, showing the double-decker arrangement. The various paintings represent advertisements and can be seen on various other vehicles too. |
The name Minegara is a combination of Minecraft
and Tangara – the train that I used as a basis.
An actual Tangara pictured at Sydney Olympic Park in September 2020.
The trains were introduced to Sydney in 1988 and continue to work on the suburban rail network today, including across the Harbour Bridge.
So that’s all for the bridge itself and the vehicles which populate it. But there’s two more Australian bits of the build to consider.
Sky Airways
The intention of this plane was to represent QANTAS – it is
positioned so, with enough rendering, one can re-create a famous QANTAS A380
advertisement, itself a reference to a much older QANTAS ad. Both featured a
low-level (though bit higher than this) flypast of the Harbour Bridge. The
craft is constructed mostly of concrete blocks, diorite, and andesite. It is not modelled on a particular plane, but bears a passing resemblance to a Boeing 767.
Recreating the famous QANTAS advert, unfortunately spoilt by the low render distance.
Despite the intention being to build a QANTAS plane, the
finished aircraft looks more like the LEGO City LC7893 aircraft set from
2006, as I was using this model as a reference. This is particularly apparent
with its white, grey and blue livery.
The interior features a cockpit, first class (aka posh
seats), economy class and lavatories, as on a real plane. First and Economy
feature distinct red and blue colour schemes.
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| The Posh Seats |
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| Economy Class |
Crackerjack
Named after a prominent player on SkyServers, this ferry is a mashup of two Sydney Ferries classes: An Emerald and a First Fleet. The hull and body are constructed from warped planks and sandstone respectively, whilst the interior features more woods.
This is the third ferry I have built to a similar design, but the first I’ve made from sandstone and wood, having previously used concrete to capture the SF livery. Of the three, this is my favourite.
So, there we are, my Sydney Harbour Bridge build. I
hope you have enjoyed reading this little insight into what I’ve spent three
weeks procrastinating university for and hope you’ll pay it a visit!
You can find the build on the SkyServers Minecraft server – IP: sky-mc.net and by typing /warp harbourbridge once online.
Tah tah and thanks for reading!
-TheBritFromOz
