Tunnel City is now double tracked

Tunnel City is now double tracked, on my model railroad.

This tunnel is imaginarily placed in Iowa, not the real one in Wisconsin.

The original bore is on the left, going through a divider wall in the basement.
I made it just large enough for a train, and small enough that it could be covered up with an electical blind cover if it ever becomes 'abandoned'.

The second bore is very useful, because it allows a simple loop track plan for that route,
without waiting for trains on the other track.

With the Russelville and Pleasant Valley track work, this fairly completes what I can do with the mainline on this railroad.
Now I can keep two to 4 trains moving on two loops without getting in the way of each other.
And they can still be routed between loops. This area is complicated, because there's two wyes using the original tunnel, and train direction can be reversed here.

The original tunnel had a paper printed tunnel portal of Tunnel City (Wisconsin) taped to the wall. Now I changed the tunnel. I liked the one at Belleville, now on a bike trail southwest of Madison, Wisconsin. The south portal is limestone block, and the north is concrete, so that gives some variety. But like all old tunnels, I had a problem with height. I have 2 container stack well cars (only 2) which test the clearances all over my rails. For years, I thought 3 inches of height would allow for any rail car. But my stacks are 3 and an eigth inch high. The real Tunnel City (and other tunnels) had to have their height increased, or actually, their floor lowered. So I lowered the floor of the Belleville tunnel by using a photo program to clone some more blocks onto the bottom of the walls. And I had to clear away some bothersome tree shadows. And on top of that, I had to have 2 portals with an inch and a half between them, that's the width of the old stud in the wall between portals. It was easy to use the same picture twice. I could have used different pictures to show different modeling ages of these tunnels, and since it's only paper, I still can. And to get some 3-D effect in this corner of a room, I could make one have a retaining wall jutting out further than the other. And along the one wall of this corner of the room.

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I used my drafting program to have some layout lines matching the tunnel holes, and then added the tunnel portal pictures and stretched them to the width of the bores. I didn't remove all my layout lines before printing, so I had some lines to guide my cutting. Also, the actual tunnels just happened to have the tracks not level, the road bed on the right is an eigth inch higher. due to 'site conditions'

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There's not much to this tunnel, it's only 4-1/2 inches long.
Normally, I can't see through the wall, but I set the camera on the tracks to look at it.
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I used the concrete north portal version on the other side of the 'hill'.

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I re-used the original paper picture of Tunnel City and taped it on the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi River, closer to where people expect it.

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