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.

Here’s more of how it went together.  I was particularly proud of the tiny little support column that was used originally when the tunnel was blasted out (before it was sleeved).  Afterwards, they poured the sleeve around half of it.  Since my model had the sleeving, I only made the column to half width.  

The blasting ‘daylighted’ part of the third tunnel so that you can see over to the other side of the river.  Because of this, I ended up doing scenery behind it so that when you looked into the viewing portal, you’d see the sleeve and then through the open parts of it to the scenery behind it.  Really liked the effect.

Everything here was fashioned from foam, painted with flat white acrylic, and then ‘painted’/stained with WS pigments.

Unfortunately after assembly it became clear the portal I had made for viewing purposes did not show off any of the concrete work I’d hoped to have visible.  I ended up having to cut out a chunk of the concrete sleeving on one side (where you see the columns supported by horizontal beams near the floor).  Oh well. 🙂

One of the key parts of my model, as mentioned, is the Quintette Tunnels near Othello.  Usually with tunnels model railroaders settle for nice detail at either end but otherwise leave it open (and accessible) and un-sceniced on the inside.  There’s good reason for that – a) you never see it anyway usually and b) you can rescue trains.  Another thing modellers usually do is ‘compress’ tunnels to a lesser length than they would be in full scale.  The objective is to give you the impression of the tunnel without taking up too much room.

Well, I’m not that kind of guy.  The third tunnel in this scene is a really cool 405 footer with a concrete portal at one end, and I was determined to scale it exactly, but also to provide a viewing portal through the side to see the train.  That meant needing to scenic the inside of it, including some details of the concrete ‘sleeve’ inside.  And that’s what I set about doing here.  I ended up breaking the tunnel’s foam segments apart, building the concrete sleeve and detailing it, and then sandwiching it all back together. I created the rounded roof by getting a piece of wood dowling (about 1.1" diameter to scale correctly, taping sandpaper around it and then rubbing it (get those filthy thoughts out of your mind people!) along a piece of foam until I had a concrete roof.

And here is why historical aerials are so valuable.  Above, we have Hope as it was in 1961.  Below is Hope ca. 2010.  In 2010, the railbed is completely gone.  Hope Street and 3rd Ave, as it turns out, did not cross the tracks (couldn’t have – 3rd would have run smack into the middle of the wye, and Hope would have found itself bisecting the yard), but rather 3rd ended at Hope St. and Hope St. bent southeast and paralleled the tracks back to 4th Ave.   In fact, that little alleyway running off of 4th towards the northwest appears to be a remnant of that road.  The triangular area the wye occupied became housing, and just to the east Hope Secondary School’s field has appeared in what was railway tracks.  It’s really quite amazing to see how much changed in a space of 50 years.  You would never know there was a railway there today.  But it’s neat seeing where old roads were – now when I’m in Hope, I know why some intersections near the former yard look kind of weird or like they were hacked apart.  Some spots still retain vestiges of the old intersections before the roads were realigned.  Brain candy for a history buff!

One day I discovered Canada’s National Air Photo Library (NAPL).  Apparently, almost since the advent of the airplane, governments have been conducting aerial surveys of places for various purposes.  These were carried out from various elevations at high resolution.  And as it turned out, I got lucky – they had one featuring Hope.  The earliest I could get (or could find) was 1961, which was 2 years after the line was closed due to slides, but it worked for my purposes because they had not yet set about to dismantling it.  In fact, a segment of the track in Hope would remain until around 1970.   But seeing this was like taking blinders off.  Now I knew where everything was.

The photo cost about $40, scanned at very high resolution from the original negatives.  It’s black and white and when you zoom in close it does start getting fuzzy due to the elevation and limitations of the camera tech at the time, but it’s good enough to pick out individual buildings, bridges and other features.  Further, with Google Earth, I was able to use still-extant buildings in 2010 and the measurement tool to establish a scale and better position things on the model.  When I get to that phase, of course. 🙂

I annotated this one as I figured out streets.  Unfortunately, the angle prevented me from seeing where and how Hope Street (purple) ended, and whether it crossed into the yard.  These questions would only be answered via an actual aerial photograph dating from 1960.