The hill becomes a mountain, track testing & more!

Today I continued to blindly plough ahead with my mountain building.   Honestly, I'm not at all sure how this will come out, but at least I'm having a crash at it.   Below you can see the overall progress as it stands now.  I have the far side of the tunnel set in plaster cloth (still drying as I write) and the tunnel roughed in in foam blocks.  My current plan is to build the near side of the tunnel next, in much the same way, and then construct the top separately, and keep it removable to allow access to the track inside.

Innovation abounds!  I've started masking my track before dribbling on it!

I cast abutments for my viaduct using some plaster/spackle type stuff that goes on pink and dries white, which is great.  Tomorrow I'll sand it smooth, square it, and give it a coat of Polyscale "Aged Concrete".  I expect it'll be mostly hidden by my roadbed, but this gap needed filling and what does peek through should look good.

You may have noticed in the first photo that I've got a new shelf on the wall.  I built this three years ago and only now put it up!  Easy project, took an evening, and cost about $15 for lumber and screws and about the same again on flextrack.  I think an extra 1/2" height in the shelves would have made it better, but it serves it's purpose well.

Corner clamps make building stuff like this (and your benchwork) really easy.

On the shelves are some miscellaneous bits and pieces I've been using to test track.  The big green north american box car that entirely does not match anything I own but was a very well intentioned gift) has proven extremely valuable as it is the tallest car I own.  This means it's my tunnel clearance test mule.

On the shelf below are three very long German passenger cars, these are for testing curves for clearances and aesthetics.

Bottom shelf features some very forgiving (read short 2 axle) european freight stock, good to use for watching cars wobble on the tracks to find little kinks and such.

The locomotive on the top right is a BWI E8A with sound, and those of you who have messed about with N scale sound will know that engines like this are bloodhounds for finding connectivity issues.   It need only cross a dirty rail for the sound to cycle through the startup sequence.  Rather then get annoyed I have chosen to embrace this fault detection feature.


Dear Readers:  Was this post more than you wanted to know?  Please leave a comment.  I'm new at this and still groping for the the right balance of content quantity vs. content quality.  Too many rail blogs go dead for weeks at a time, I do not want to be one of those, but I also do not want to waste your time.  Would you rather see one post covering 3 weeks of hill/river/tunnel work, or posts like this one walking you through the details.  Do you want ugly photos showing the process, or pretty pictures of polished results?  Let me know please!

-Jaggy