Have a Cigar: Accessibility

How do you get to a tunnel inside a cigar box? Not to mention a battery pack and wiring? From the outset of this project, these were circumstances for which I've been carefully planning. Here's what I had to hide:



My original idea was simple: make the upper half of the scenery removable. Problem: since having to "daylight" the upper tunnel (owing to a miscalculation), the top half of the scenery was then split in two. New idea: make two separate scenery pieces to remove. Problem: I'd also decided to build a road bridge across the upper track, which would span the two scenery parts. This gave rise the final idea: make the bridge really strong so that the two scenery parts could be treated as one.

To make a really strong bridge, I made a substructure out of heavy brass. The main part is a half-inch wide, .025-inch-thick strip. After bending it to form a rough arch, I soldered each end to a plate, which I glued and screwed to the Gatorfoam scenery parts. (If this sounds like overkill, trust me, it's not; the stresses on the connecting plates would easily separate the bridge from the Gatorfoam if it was only glued.) Here's the result:



Bear in mind that, by the time I'm done, all of this will disappear. The entire brass substructure will be embedded in a styrene bridge modeled to look like either concrete or stone, and the plates on the ends will be buried under pavement and scenery.

Concurrently I was making a set of indexing pins so that the removable part would reliably align with the layout base. The indexing pins are simply lengths of 1/8-inch diameter styrene tubing. Once the removable parts were properly positioned, I drilled holes all the way through the layout, then bonded the tubing to the removable parts. You can see the three indexing pins, as well as the four screws that help hold the bridge in place, on the underside of the removable part:



Now the removable assembly simply drops onto the layout, covering the lower tunnel as well as the battery pack and wiring:



At last I'm ready to start on the scenery—something I'd anticipated would already be well under way. Not that I'm complaining; I actually enjoy problem-solving: it keeps one on one's toes.