Back to my container port subject that is the title of this subject thread.
Hidden Track Influence
One of the initial and very important influences on the development of my container port scene is, 'how do I incorporate that hidden track I wished to utilize to 'hide' some of the trains from having to pass in front of the LA Santa Fe station and the container port scene,....trains such as coal trains, tank car trains, etc'. Just certain types that I would prefer ran UNSEEN thru the west coast container port area. I spoke about some of that over
HERE.
Now I have done some more experimenting that I will present here.
I started out with this idea,...
Please realize that I don't intend to have any 'top' over that track, just a view block of stiff paper or very thin foam board.
Since this will primarily be behind stacks of containers in my container yard scene, perhaps the containers themselves (movable) could provide much of that viewblock?
Rather quickly I began to think I would need a top on that tunnel over the track so I could stack a few containers on top of the tunnel. Probably I can make this stack of containers and tunnel structure all as one UNIT that could be lifted off to access the hidden track.
So what about the height required of the tunnel? Here you can see that I need a height of at least 3 1/4” to get those very tall auto-max cars under.
Two things emerged.
1) My tunnel could/should be at least 2 containers wide,...so 2 3/8” which is greater than the 2” wide tunnel I was originally contemplating,...great.
2) Depending on the height(s) of the tracks underneath there might be some variation in the height of the top of the tunnel. At any rate it appears that the top of my tunnel is/was going to be such that it intersected the stack in an uneven manner,..about half way up the height of a std container. What to do about this?
My next thoughts turned to the fact that the concrete pads of the container port would need to be high enough to be even with the tops of the rails in the container loading area. So here are 3 of those mock-ups, with the tunnel track mounted down at plywood surface height as well.
...the green box car is an overheight box car I stuck in there to see if I might just make my hidden track tunnel clearance a bit shorter? (Turns out I have firmly decided that this tunnel MUST be full height to accept all of double height container cars, dbl-auto racks, etc)
Next I cut out a paper template to represent the tunnel size (with and height),..its at the end of that green box car
So that tunnel over the hidden tracks is going to have to be painted on its outer-side with some image of stacked containers,..with the upper one just a partial view.
But how about this?,..... bring the tunnel side all the way up to this next 'even container height' (height of 3 containers), put a top on it, and stack another container on the top of that so the whole stack against the back wall appears to be 4 containers high??