Tunnel making material

[BamaMan]

Ok guys. I am very new to this and my first set is to arrive on Wednesday of this week. My question is of course about tunnels. I have seen i think that some of them are made from carving the tunnel out of the hard foam sheets one can buy at craft stores or wherever.

This train will run (out of scale) thru my christmas village initially. I need a tunnel on the back side that a few of my houses can also sit on top of. I had planned on getting some of that foam, glueing two together one on tope of the other and carving out my first ever tunnel. I have seen guys on youtube using huge pieces, like 4x8 and cutting them down. All i can find is pieces like 1x2 feet. And its about 10-12 bucks a sheet. Thats at a Michaels or whatnot. Got to be a better place or material to use. Any help here for an N scale tunnel?

thx!

[Trucula]

Try Home Depot, Lowe's, etc. Look for the blue/green foam board. You don't need a 4x8 sheet to make an N scale tunnel..The 2 inch foam is expensive...Don't use the white "pressed together beaded" stuff..Its ok but you can't sculpt it and cutting it makes a mess.
Sometimes you can dumpster dive in a building development for scraps or work out a deal with the builders to save ya some pieces.

[UP2CSX]

Do like Bob says and visit a few residential construction sites. The walls of the homes are usually sheathed in the kind of extruded foam you want. You can usually find them in the dumpster or just laying around the site as scraps after they've been cut. Ask someone for permission if there are people at the site but, as long as you're not walking off with entire sheets of foam, most contractors don't mind unloading some scrap on you instead of their dumpster.

[BamaMan]

thx guys. definetly knew that I didnt have to have a 4x8 sheet, just knew that I could buy that cheaper than what I was finding at the craft stores.
Thx again!

[MRLdave]

Not sure how you are setting up your village, but I do a similar thing at Christmas with my N scale trains...... As you mentioned you are out of scale anyway, so "accuracy" really isn't a big thing. So I just built a wooden deck with some legs to set over my track, and then I just draped one of those cloths that are supposed to look like snow over the top and used a piece of PVC cut in half as my tunnel portal. It's hidden behind the first row of buildings anyway.And if you position the cloth with a little artistic flair, it looks pretty good. Works well for me, and the whole thing cost like $10....a 2'X4' piece of plywood, a 4' piece of 2X2 for legs, 1 PVC fitting for the tunnel portal, and the snow cloth. When Chistmas is over, I unscrew the legs and the whole thing stores under other boxes of stuff very easily. As you may have gathered....don't get foam from the craft store......you'll go broke, and it isn't the best for carving either.

[BamaMan]

Not sure how you are setting up your village, but I do a similar thing at Christmas with my N scale trains...... As you mentioned you are out of scale anyway, so "accuracy" really isn't a big thing. So I just built a wooden deck with some legs to set over my track, and then I just draped one of those cloths that are supposed to look like snow over the top and used a piece of PVC cut in half as my tunnel portal. It's hidden behind the first row of buildings anyway.And if you position the cloth with a little artistic flair, it looks pretty good. Works well for me, and the whole thing cost like $10....a 2'X4' piece of plywood, a 4' piece of 2X2 for legs, 1 PVC fitting for the tunnel portal, and the snow cloth. When Chistmas is over, I unscrew the legs and the whole thing stores under other boxes of stuff very easily. As you may have gathered....don't get foam from the craft store......you'll go broke, and it isn't the best for carving either.

Very similar to what I had pictured except I was just going to use the foam, with the tunnel cut out at the bottom and houses sitting on top of it. I also use the sheet that supposed to look like snow to cover my counter and the tunnel also. WIll consider definetly using PVC, had not thought about it. I still have a few days being my set wont be here till Wednesday. Maybe UPS will deliver it one day early? ;)

[MRLdave]

I only use the PVC as the portal, to keep the cloth from hitting the train. I don't make the whole tunnel length PVC, just the 3 or 4 inches at each end. And if you're covering the hill with the cloth anyway, the lumber route is cheaper and easier. It's also easier to get under if you have any train problems....with the foam you'll need to pick the whole mountain up,along with the houses if your train stalls or derails in the tunnel.

[Bob]

Ëó÷øèé ôîðóì î âçëîìàõ äëÿ èãðû âîâ. Íàâàëîì ïîëåçíîé èíôîðìàöèè

Wow, imported spam! Is that more expensive than the regular stuff? ;)

[fast_ian]

Wow, imported spam! Is that more expensive than the regular stuff? ;)

Hell yeah! :D

While we've got a mod around (I like that you guys are here, but generally keep a low profile ;)) is there any reason we can't add "xtc" as a valid file format? [I know we can do it via zip, but why not "native" xtc?]

Cheers,
Ian

[Bob]

What's xtc? Xtrad cad files?

[Cjcrescent]

What's xtc? Xtrad cad files?

Yes, they are.

[fast_ian]

What's xtc? Xtrad cad files?

Sorry - Yep it's the native format that XtrackCad (or however it's spelt these days) uses to save. Seems many folk here have gone thru the (considerable) pain of figuring it out and could "share" layout ideas without needing to zip & unzip. The native files are small - A 10K xtc file compresses to ~2k, but so what.....

Cheers,
Ian