I made all the modifications today so all the grade crossings are now flush with the railroad ties. It wasn't as bad as I thought. I marked the location with a sharpie, used a utility knife to make the initial cuts at the edges and scraped the ballast loose. I used the shop vac to remove almost all of the ballast and then went back with the utility knife to trim the Flexibed at the ties.
Then I went and modified all the road foam. I'm running low on the 3/4" which led to a major resource conservation program where all the left over bits and pieces were bonded to the main pieces to get back to the correct length after I had to cut off all the tapered ends.
I also cut a curve into one of the streets that was making a 90º turn, plus cut some quarter-round (inverted) curve fillers that will make the street corners not sharp angles, but have little curves in them.
There is now a parking area that will sit next to the train station. We're expecting lots of passenger traffic on this line so a nice sized parking lot was a necessity. The drill press vise is providing necessary pressure on the foam filler piece that is now curing. I used Loctite Foam Insulation adhesive to glue all the filler pieces onto their supporting wooden structure underneath. You can see hear that two pieces were hot-glued together to make up the lot. There are no more pieces left that are big enough to do it in one go.
I decided that it was time to make the cut through the hill separating the inside and outside loops and made a road piece that passes through the cut. It looks quite rough right now, but it will work out once the lumps are filled in and the plaster work is done. There is an upgrade moving towards the foreground since the out loop is still coming down grade at this point. There's a relief cut at the inflection point of the middle road piece to make that transition easier.
With all the road pieces correctly fit, I started measuring and cutting the building sub-foundation foam pieces that will support all the town's structures. I'm able to crawl out on this part of the layout if I'm very careful and put my weight onto the foam pieces, and watch for the unsupported areas.
I should finish making these cuts tomorrow (or Monday). I'll glue them in, but not the street. I'll removed the streets to laminate the road surface off the layout. It will give me much more control, and then I'll re-install them with adhesive. I'm leaving a gap between the building foundation pieces and the railroad which will be sculpted and landscaped a bit. I may put a chamfer on the edges so the transition will be a little softer.
With all this major work out of the way, it will time to start plastering the ravines and get those bridges back in business.
