Jan 2011 – After a brief hiatus, and yet another visit to the prototype, I decided to make some revisions. First among them was chopping out a scale 80 foot stretch of rock between the first and second tunnels to get the distance between them correct. That was a painful (and hard – saws don’t like going through superhardened spackling!). Next, after figuring out how the Othello and tunnels scenes were going to integrate, I added to the end of my scene and created a bore for the first tunnel, which I had planned to leave out originally (the train would have gone through Othello, into a blind corner and behind a wall of solid rock blocking the viewer from seeing anything behind, and then appear in the bore leading towards the second tunnel). But, I had to have it. The first tunnel is actually over 550 feet long, and with the wall being only 13 feet long, and the problem of corners, I had to compress that one tunnel’s length. I also added a pseudo mountain, scaled down a bit from Z-scale, to provide the mountain range that sits at the west end of Othello, forcing the railroad to make a bend south towards and through the tunnels. I made some really tiny trees and created a ‘distanced’ hillside with it.