This entry follows on from a throw-away remark about scribing the retaining walls...

Image courtesy Derek Hawkins - Wikipiedia Commons.

At first glance, the retaining walls appear to be in laid coursed stone - so no problem there - except some of the courses appear to be ashlar blocks. However -

A close-up lineside shot (with a telephoto NOT trespassing!) shows this is, in fact, the natural coursing of the limestone through which the cutting & tunnel was made.

So it was just a case of cutting the walls from the foam to the various heights as shown in several images of the area, drawing the straight but irregular height courses in, and then scribing in the irregular limestone blocks. Fortunately the depron is easily scribed with a pencil lead (I use a 0.3, 4H drop-lead pencil) a reasonable amount of time and mindless tedium!

For example this section - which will abut the quarry tunnel -

actually only took about 30 minutes of scribing.

The complete wall on th south side (about 300 scale feet -

took about 4 hours to complete. All I have to do now is complete the north side wall, build the same lengths again for the next scenic board, and then I can get on and paint them! Apologies by the way for the apparent state of the trackwork - the camera is very cruel and it doesn't look as bad in 'real life'!