Tower Bridge 3D puzzle

I recently completed putting together a small 3D puzzle of London’s Tower Bridge that quite closely resembles this one – only mine was found very grubby (but still shrink-wrap-sealed) at my local flea market, and was also some kind of knock-off, as it was not enjoying the National Geographic branding displayed in the linked video.

After drenching the box with disinfectant and washing my hands multiple times, I opened it up and put the puzzle together – at only 120 pieces, it only took a couple of hours, although it did manage to spread slightly dusty foam discard bits all over the living room during the process.

The instructions in my knock-off flea market special edition of this puzzle left a fair amount to be desired, particularly failing to indicate proper turret and tower orientation, so there was a bit of taking apart and trying again going on, resulting in a couple of foam pieces breaking under the extra strain of being put together, then taken apart and put together again. (I only watched the video of this puzzle after I finished putting it together myself. Otherwise would have felt like cheating.)

I will assume that the more upmarket original does better by way of instructions and perhaps the pieces are less fragile, as well.
Still, I paid maybe $3 plus tax for mine, and at that price I’m not going to complain, I figure I was entertained for about $1 an hour and now I have a Tower Bridge in the puzzle-display area (at least until I need the space to show off something else.)

The puzzle is complete with the option of having the lift section of the bridge being either open or shut!

This bridge is not actually as old as you might think, it’s a late Victorian construction designed to allow increased road traffic between the banks of the Thames while maintaining ship access to what at the time was one of the world’s busiest ports. Since the late 1950s and 1960s, when inter-modal container shipping took over the goods transportation world, shipping patterns changed significantly, with containers allowing for much quicker loading and unloading of much larger ships, ships too large to be accommodated along the Thames in London, no matter how nice the lift bridge was.
The wharf infrastructure around which Tower Bridge was built is basically gone now, although there is still some river traffic.

I have read that river traffic maintains priority over road traffic, as was established at the time of the bridge’s construction, and the bridge is lifted about five hundred times a year these days, according to this Tower Bridge site, (much less often than the six thousand times I’ve seen quoted as the number of lifts in it’s first year of operation!)

Next up in puzzles for me, I will likely be putting together a smaller 500 piece Ravensburger with raccoons lemurs sloths.