DIORAMA DETAILS – The Tunnel That Wasn’t: A Clever Optical Illusion, or Bad Scale Modeling?

Today I’m going to do something a little unusual and focus on a misfire. Specifically, a design element of my diorama that has never satisfied me, and that I’ve never really known what to do with. I was talking to a friend who was visiting me about this recently, and looking at it in person, he came up with an interesting idea about how to remake this area, but it’s one that I don’t know that I want to pursue because it would be both disruptive and potentially destructive. Even so, I sometimes feel like I need to do something about it…and then again, sometimes I feel like it’s just fine exactly the way it is, and I should leave well enough alone! I want to know what YOU think!

The entrance to the inspection station, where racing cars are brought in by drivers and their teams, almost always on trucks or trailers but occasionally street-driven, is – and should be – separate from the spectator’s entrance at the main gate near the parking lot. Access to the inspection station is gained by an east/west-running street called Mesa Flats Road, named for the town directly to the west of Wardglenn, that crosses Bear Valley Road at a right angle and dead-ends at the track (an attempt was made in 1980 to rename the street “Whyte Ave” in honor of Drag City’s new owner Willard Whyte, but both the Wardglenn and Mesa Flats town councils balked at the idea).

Almost every racing track in the world has a dedicated entrance for racing teams and their cars, which only makes logical sense. But the structure of my track didn’t really allow for such access to exist. When I originally built this version of the track, I actually did try to construct some sort of a bridge in this area for this function, but although I built a couple of different models, what I found was that each one of them had such a large footprint that they took up too much real estate, detracting from the overall look of the diorama. In order to leave those bridges in place, everything would’ve looked too compacted and unrealistic.

So, wanting to get started racing and not wanting to get hung up on a diorama element I was having no luck solving, I opted instead for an optical illusion: the idea hit me that the banked section of the track could be presented as if it were cut through, and if cars were headed toward it and even going underneath it, the dark area below the track would make it look like it were an opening to a tunnel.

The idea is that there is a slight decline underneath the track where traffic passes under it, the other side which comes out in the inspection station area. But the question then is….where in the inspection station area? If you look at the pictures of the inspection area in this post below, you can see there really isn’t an obvious place where the other side of that tunnel would exit.

This presented me with a conundrum. About the only idea that I could come up with was that the tunnel underneath the banked section of the track also had to contain a 90° bend, which would mean that the vehicles going through it would end up between these two sections of track indicated by the red oval here, where they would move along in a single file to the break in the fence, only to then have to cross the track at turn 13 alongside the ped gantry.

As winter approaches, I’m going to start doing some work in this area with artificial grass, clay, some colored paper and some paint to make this area seem a little more colorful and realistic, but my plan to do so is being tied by this “faux tunnel.” I’m really not sure what to do about it. Over the past couple of months, I’ve even tried to get a couple of different AI’s to examine pictures of this area and imagine their own ideas of what it might look like based on copiously, detailed descriptions and prompts, but although some interesting ideas have come out of it, none of them look right or feasible for the model

Which brings me back to a suggestion by my friend Patrick that I actually cut a significant rectangular slice out of the top of the table right underneath this area, and then craft-most likely out of stiff cardboard-a dip in the road, which would then be fixed to the bottom of the table – I imagine by stapling or very small nails that won’t go all the way through the plywood to the top. That’s not a bad idea, but I worry about all the deconstruction and mess that would cause, and the effect that it will have on the overall layout. What really scared me about this idea is that it would wind up like my attempts at a bridge: even being under the table, the exit area might create a bigger footprint than the shape of the track really allows for. And if it didn’t work out, then were would I be, with a rectangular piece missing from the top of my table? I’m still mulling it over.

^{The above efforts by a different AI seemed to render the model more closely, although the look of these images is more “toy like,” or actually realistic as opposed to “photo-realistic!”}

The more I think about it, the more I think I’m going to wind up just leaving it the way it is and trying to design around it in a way that looks as realistic as I can, leaving the question as to where the other end of this tunnel actually exits forever unanswered. Honestly, if you look at it from the road-side at a right angle to the track, it doesn’t look too bad! At least, I don’t think it does!

I can imagine that any model railroaders who may be reading this are getting ready for head explosions about now, since that particular breed of world-builder is often fanatical about exactly this type of realism. I appreciate that, but as I stated in one of my earliest posts, that’s not really me: my primary focus here is the cars and the track; the geography is secondary. If you look around at my overall layout, there’s all kinds of stuff to criticize: the shape of the carnival, for instance, isn’t very realistic, and that’s another area where access across the track that must exist somewhere for the pedestrian traffic on both sides is nowhere to be seen.

Trust me: I am aware of these shortcomings; my diorama is far from perfect, but for those of us who are focused on the slot-cars and the diecasts, it’s pretty easy to overlook this kind of stuff. So maybe by pondering this, I’m asking too much of my layout. Even so, I am open to suggestions! Any of you skilled scale modelers out there have any ideas about how you would handle this?