Utrainia is expanding

Now that the prairie scene is more or less finished, it's time for Utrainia to expand. Since every module so far has been a straight line, I decided it was time to make a corner module.

So this morning I jumped on the computer, fired up Inventor and started sketching out a track centreline and the module boundaries. The great thing about Inventor is that it's parametric, so you can define relationships between things, such as "these two lines need to be parallel, at 45° to everything else, and 300mm apart. You can then drag things around until everything lines up.

So plan in hand I went down to the workshop and started chopping my timber.

A couple of hours later and I had the ends made up:

The angled centre presents a bit of a challenge, as I plan to have a large curving viaduct. This means that I need about 200mm of clear space under the track, a lot more than the usual 50mm I work with. So I have had to include a "drop bottom" in the design. Here it is upside down:

By 5pm it was all assembled and looking pretty good.

Tomorrow I will make a start on attaching and forming the polystyrene. Rough plan for the module is to have a single track passing between some low hills before crossing over a deep valley on the viaduct, then on the far side a steep mountain which it will then enter. It should be pretty dramatic scenery with some good hills. I plan to make it a continuation of the snow scene I've already made, which means several hundred more snowy conifers to make. Oh boy! And the viaduct currently looks like this:

Should keep me busy for a while yet.