Train to Freiburg by Will Vale, on Flickr
I thought I'd take all the junk (well, most of it) off the layout so I could see how things were going. The ballast has worked out well, the tunnels are boxed in at long last, and I like the sweep of the track at the left hand end. Still no bridge though, as you can see:
The problem I've come across is that with the tunnel through the Hirschsprung in place, and the Oberen Hirschsrpung Tunnel which hides the exit to the fiddle yard, there isn't really enough room in between to capture the necessary features. There should be a rock shed, which is at least half a full-length coach, maybe a bit more, then various retaining walls and space to see a decent length of train before the next tunnel swallows it up again.
On the model there's rather less space:
Compare this with the real location:
http://maps.google.de/?ll=47.937428,8.021425&spn=0.00173,0.004128&t=k&z=19&vpsrc=6
It's frustrating, since the real thing isn't impossibly long, it's just more room than I've left space for. I was so keen to get the scale of the bridge at the left hand end exact, and retain the sweep of the track up to the middle tunnel, that the interesting right-hand side has got rather marginalised. The bridge isn't even there in reality, it's just out of scene to the left before the Falkenstein Tunnel
I suspect there isn't much I can do about this at this point - shifting the whole RHS left a bit is possible but I don't think I have the time - only about 7 weeks to finish the layout now. A less dramatic option would be to push the final tunnel mouth back around the return curve, but the scale length coaches look pretty silly on 145mm radius, the fine scale track stops just inside the tunnel, and I'd probably have to make a considerably wider-than-scale portal to avoid scraping paint off the coach sides.
I may end up compressing the rock shed and walled section behind the portal (the tunnel was partially destroyed by Wehrmacht forces near the end of WW2, and rebuilt with some fairly serious walls where once was bare rock - see the Tunnel Portale site for more details).
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