I spent some time pasting together Google Maps images and watching cab rides to see better how the line behaves between Falkensteig and Hirschsprung. Then I laid out potential track plans in SCARM (which is brilliant) and tried to put the two together. It looks like I'll need to compress reality about 2:1 to fit the stretch I want in the space I can manage. For a "railway in the countryside" layout that doesn't seem too bad to me.

I ended up truncating the fiddle yards to two roads each - I was thinking I could get three, but it felt like a tight squeeze and I wasn't confident in my ability to build them out into the back of the scenery. The joggle in the tunnel is probably a bit too extreme as well and would benefit from a gentle realignment, although it does make it easier to get the big foreground rock in.

If you haven't seen the line this video might be helpful. It starts just before the bridge and Falkenstein tunnel, traverses the layout portion, and has a look at the rock pillars and the joggle around the upper tunnel. The tunnels have been edited out but you get the idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj-twTaMl6Y

[Video from Youtube user "hagugo", who has enabled embedding.

Once I'd got that worked out I made a perspective snapshot and traced/sketched over it in Photoshop (no scanner, you see) to see what it might look like. I'm not great with a pencil, or indeed a tablet, but it's a useful exercise, sketches helped me solve a lot of structural scenery problems on Tanis.

I need to do one from the other end - the track re-appears from the Unterer Hirschsprung-Tunnel for 400mm or so before disappearing into the Oberer Hirschsprung-Tunnel and thence returning to the fiddle yard. You can just see the second tunnel mouth in the sketch. There's quite a bit of rock work to fit into the corner and I'm not entirely convinced there's room for it all, hence the need for this planning

The bridge in the foreground is just on the other (west) side of the Falkenstein-Tunnel in reality, but I really like it so I thought I'd move it. Otherwise the visible section would be more-or-less entirely the road and the railway on a gentle curve separated by what looks like a scree slope (but presumably is netted or otherwise made safe from rock falls). In the sketch I've shown the side valley going in the same direction as in real life, but it'd probably be easier to fold it away if the road turned west towards the corner of the layout.

I had two wacky ideas while doing all this: One is to leave the return curves unsoldered, so it would be possible to convert the module to a straight through one and model Falkensteig on the left, and/or Bahnhof Hirschsprung on the right. The other is to have the return curves off the module altogether, and just plug them in or have them on fold-out flaps. I think that might be over-engineering or over-thinking things though, and it might be best to just build things as simply as possible so that I can finish it

One other interesting question is whether to have a backscene, given that in reality the valley side would be higher than the layout. I wonder what it would look like if there was a lighting pelmet in the foreground, and the rockwork and greenery in the background just went up to the "top" behind that, so that you couldn't see the end from normal viewing angles?