It's Deja Vu All Over Again

The passenger car is the biggest car I have, so I use it to check clearances.

I started building the terrain leading up to the north portal of Stares Tunnel. I don't have a name for this hill yet, but by the end of this post I might.

I started by using my trim router to put a 45 degree bevel on the edge of the plywood roadbed. In the future, I will cut these bevels on the road bed sections in the wood shop on the router table before assembling. That will be much easier. Still, the trim router did a nice job except for places where the tool couldn't fit. In those spots I used my utility knife to trim the bevels.

Next I started building up the terrain using a combination of sheet foam and cardboard webbing.   One objective was to disguise the turn back loop into the tunnel. The high hill and fascia do a good job of hiding the curve, especially as one enters the room and looks to the right.  Some trees on the top of the hill will help enhance the view block and help isolate the scene even more. 

One can never have too many clamps

Tennessee Pass Layout under construction

As I was building this hill, I started getting a strong sense of Deja Vu. Then, I realized, I had built a similar  hill in this spot once before. It was for my N scale Tennessee Pass layout. That time I used styrofoam sheets to build up the hill as it was not as tall as this O scale hill.  On the N Scale backdrop was Mt Elbert.  There will be no mountain on the backdrop in this new version.

Until I come up with a better name, I'll call this area  Deja View Ridge. 

Here are 600 of the 1200 trees I had on the Tennessee Pass layout