Town Planning

Something I've been considering for a while with no actual action, is what to do about the tunnel under Wassen's church. I've been back and forth over two options:

1. Have a normal tunnel portal - the 'main street' will disappear behind the hill, the church sits on the hill, and a grassy slope runs down from it to the tunnel portal
2. Have the main road road run in front of all this on a bridge which hides the tunnel portal. The Church is on the hill and the grassy slope runs down to the bridge as usual.

There are pros and cons for both.

In the real Wassen, there is a big motorway that runs between the town's main street and the railway. It crosses the railway on a bridge in front of the tunnel we are discussing, and runs along and just above the railway, crossing over the Wattinger tunnel and Reuess river on another bridge. I've marked it in blue in the map below.

On the layout, I have pulled out my artistic licence (which seems to have expired) and 'merged' the two roads  - with the south end bridge over the creek and the upper Wattinger bridge as it should be, merging into the main road through town. In the below mockup, it then continues as the 'motorway' again over the Muhle tunnel portal.

This is reasonably realistic. It provides a visual break between the church and the railway (in the real thing the church should be higher above the rail level of course.

On the downside, the bridge takes 50 cm of an already short run of visible track on the lower level and hides it, making this the most difficult piece of the layout's track to clean.

Another negative is that being lightly coloured, it might make the vertical 'gap' between the tunnel and the church seem too small (underscoring the church not being perched high enough in the sky.)

It might be the latter that causes me to change my mind (now that I've already started building it).

As you can see, I've also started placing some mockups of building locations just to see what the town might look like.

Wassen looking south from the Church end - the main road through the middle of the pic, the motorway further left. Pic stolen from Vikas Chander

The eyes have it.

I always had great eyesight...

Until a couple of years ago when it turned out that...

I don't.



Back then, after much squinting while driving, I was encouraged to go for an eye test. Glasses for driving made reading street signs much easier, But I'm still ok reading a book or on the computer.

But not so much for working on models. And Z scale isn't exactly the easiest to work in when it comes to kitbashing and cleaning up rolling stock. Over the past few years, my really, really closeup eyesight has me struggling to focus on model rollingstock work.

If you fall into the same boat, may I suggest two visionary tools

1)   $2 glasses from a discount store. These are great for detail work. The downside is that I only find them useful when looking at things up really close, so need to keep flipping them up away from my eyes to find the knife or that paintpot - which is right in front of me but somewhere out in the fuzzy zone that extends beyond my nose when wearing the glasses.

Because of this ok-up-close but impossible-to-focus-further-out, that I've found those closeup (reading) glasses to be a bit headache inducing unless you're only doing closeup work all at once.


2) One of these I find more helpful:

Because it's easy to get closeup assistance when needed by placing items under the magnifier, but your eyes are also free and unencumbered to look at things further out with ease (now, where did I put that knife... hint: in the magnifier).

This example is a fairly cheap one from a craft store with LED lighting you can turn on and off as needed and lots of light is really important to pep up the contrast when your eyesight starts to decline.

An older example I had in the US had a hinged cover to protect the lens which this doesn't have, so some paper is placed on top when it is not in use. By the way, in the picture above taken from a distance, those UFOs are roof lightbulb reflections in the glass that are not visible when in normal use.

I love these magnifiers for painting and assembling fiddly details - if a model looks ok from this close-up then it will look superb from a normal viewing distance.