Busy day on the KV. When I started out, I never expected that my model would look any good. Had no right to: after all, I had never done modelling in my life. So it’s an understatement to say I’m pleased with progress thus far. The tunnels are really beginning to resemble their real life counterparts. I did some fixing on the first tunnel entrance.. making it more circular as per the prototype.
But now it gets tough. When I ‘designed’ this mess, the tunnels were all going to be one piece, aligned by marker and careful attention. That went out the window when I realized I had certain distances between tunnels wrong, water too high, etc. So of course, I ditched the plan and broke them up. And it’s worked well. Detail work on tunnel ends is much easier when you don’t have your hands squeezed between two mountain ranges. But then the day must come when you have to assemble them again. And this being the famous Quintette tunnels, created in perfect alignment by part-man, part-wizard KVR engineer Andrew McCulloch, I knew I had to get them in perfect alignment or I’d never hear the end of it from the little voices in my head.
Having no clue at all how to do this, n the first thing I did was make sure the tunnels were level with each other. Turns out they weren’t. . I needed to sand down one end of the third tunnel (errant spackling), and then (cringing all the way) break loose my beloved bridge footing and sand it down so that it was level with the footing at the other side. I have no idea how all this is going to come together with tracks, but I figure at least if I start out straight and level, I’m in the right zone.
I took multiple aerial shots via my phone as I worked to align. Then I went and did the same finagling between tunnels 3 and 4. It’s not perfect, but from the viewer’s perspective it won’t matter.
Now the decision point. I need to recreate the Coquihalla river between tunnels 2 and 3. But doing that usually means fixing in place tunnel 3. And that’s a problem, because there is river back behind tunnel 3 that I can’t reach once it’s in place. I’ve settled on a tricky strategy for now of tracing the footprint of the mountain for tunnel 3,and then building a river bed with spackling within those lines. I’ll then create the river with the fake water, and then slide tunnel 3 back in. Because of the awkward space behind the tunnels I won’t be able to fill in the cracks between river bed and mountain, but that’s OK. The viewer will never see it.