Dec 2010-Jan 2011 – Here you can see the huge chunk I cut out between the first two tunnels. To reattach and properly realign the segment, I drilled small holes on one side, and inserted glue covered dowling. Then I got the two halves aligned the way I wanted, pressed them carefully a bit together, leaving an impression of the dowling positions. Then I drilled each one of those impressioned, covered the other end of the dowling with glue (and the facing parts of each half) and shoved them together. Painful process. Hate tearing apart scenery. But I had to have it accurate, and my third visit had revealed the obvious distance mistake I had made. I then patched the cracks between the two halves with spackling, painted and coloured it. By now, the formerly solid mass of foam comprising the tunnels was in four pieces, which turned out to be a good thing. The more spackling I added, the heavier each chunk got.
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.
My beautiful (and short lived) rushing river. Usually for moving water they recommend a second WS product that squeezes on, and then you rake it with a brush or what have you into wave shape. What I did here though was wait until the WS ‘water’ had partially dried, then dipped a fine paintbrush into white paint, and swirled it around in the sticky WS water. The result was rushing water far more authentic than what I achieved with the squeeze thing. As mentioned, the river was short lived – as it turned out, I did not have its elevation correct (needed to be lower), and the gap between tunnels, leading to the bridge to that concrete portal, was also too short. Live and learn!
March 2010 – Now things are getting exciting. I’ve begun applying more WS colours, turf, and other details, including these fine leaf foliage pieces WS produces. Posed a C-Liner to take a photo. Even did some river detailing on the wall-side of the third tunnel. What the heck!
March 2010 – More progress. I actually found a photo of the ‘face’ of the second tunnel (the one with the distinctive opening shape), scaled it to n-scale, and then applied it to the face of my model so that I could trace the countours and cut all the cracks accurately into the face with an Xacto knife.
March 2010 – This is the fun part. Now I begin applying colour and things really start to ‘pop’. I even fashioned a tunnel portal for the third tunnel out of foam and painted it up.. just to spur me along. It would later be replaced by a cast piece. There are still many details needing fixing – some of the tunnel bores are too large.
Feb/Mar 2010 – Here you can see things really coming together. With the benefit of another trip to the tunnels, I began picking up crucial features to get the realism I wanted. I still had an as-yet major undetected error happening (way too much space between the first two tunnels), but, I was happy about how it was coming along. I was also about to create a beautiful river scene that later would have to be torn up because I had pretty much all of it wrong. 🙂
Here you can see things coming together. One pic features the assembled concrete sleeve section of the tunnel assembled, turned with the blasted out portion visible. This side will be facing the wall away from the viewer on assembly. You can also see my experimentation with spackling (extremely useful and versatile stuff). I would slather some on, let it partially dry, chip away at it. I also used some WS rock castings and integrated them into the model also. I painted the whole thing flat acrylic white (I find that works better than just applying the colors directly to the spackling). You can also see the viewing portal as the rest of the mountain around the third tunnel is reassembled.
