Tame Valley Baseboard

The River Tame and the Huddesfield Canal both sit in the Tame Valley spanned by the Saddleworth Viaduct. This is the next most challenging baseboard on the layout. It’s not as heavy and large as the Big Boy but it has its own challenges.

The plan dimensions are 2.4m by around 1.1m but a lot more variable due to the valley undulations. As I have had to compress things to get a reasonable size layout, so the topology is also compressed. Now, if I had the time, I might have planned the cross sections to be following that topography exactly.

As you can see from the plan, that involves roads, a river, a tunnel and a canal over the river. What you can’t see from this is the roads and canal also rise and fall from top to bottom. So I compromised. I decided that that the left side and the right side would be built to the same depth as the Big Boy section. I’d then build up the right section over the tunnel later.

I also decided to only slope the roads and the valley approximately and build up with XPS foam or similar to refine the topology.

You might notice that compared to the Big Boy, I built this the ‘right’ way up and only the bottom would be flat due to the Tame Valley on top. This inadvertently meant the issues I had with the slots being on the bottom, didn’t happen here. A bit of a relief.

Less holes to cut out here as well, though I did find I had to refine the topology on the fly. In fact, when I mocked up the roads, I had to bring out the jigsaw and hack a bit more. Still hacking this by the way. But that’s for another post.