The Madisonville Sub: Construction Update #50 - Trying to disguise the entrance to the lower staging yard

Entrance to Lower Level Staging

There are only two ways to effectively disguise the entrance to a staging yard; a tunnel portal or a view block like a building or a cut. Anything else, in my mind is a compromise. Unfortunately, neither will work on the lower level of the Madisonville Sub. A tunnel is geographically inappropriate and there isn't room in the foreground for a view block.

So, the compromise. At this point, it should be noted that I am not entirely satisfied with the results, but unless somebody else has a better idea, it's the best I could come up with.

There is about 6" of clearance between the backdrop and the garage door so I decided to use that space to add some depth and extend the scenery through the backdrop and use two photo background building fronts as view blocks.

One of the buildings, needed a partial side wall due to the viewing angle. I took a picture of the front, matched the scale, adjusted the color, and printed the resulting image on matte photo paper.

Then the photo was trimmed, glued to a piece of styrene with spray adhesive and glued to the back of the original building front.

Another building flat was used on the left hand side and a cut down Rix overpass was used to disguise the top of the opening. The bridge is about a 1/2 wide on the left side and about 2" wide on the right. That's the southbound EVCH-1 passing through the backdrop and arriving at Memphis Jct.

The pass through was finished off with another photograph. This time, a photo was taken of the existing Trackside Scenery backdrop behind Preston Miller yard. The resulting photo was spray glued to a piece of cardboard and stapled in place.

And here is what it looks like from the back side.

Here's a current view of the area just north of Memphis Jct. There's still a lot to be done to include figuring out what to do with the relatively large area between the fascia and the tracks on the left.

The Pig Ramp

There isn't a lot of TOFC traffic on the Madisonville Sub but there is some. During the 1970's TOFC ramps were pretty common on most railroads so I thought one would be appropriate adjacent to the yard at Preston Miller. The only thing I needed was a little more real estate to park a few trailers. I found the space by pulling out the fascia about 6 inches.