Adding a second deck - Part 3

With the completion of a working reversing loop, the famed (and arguably dubious) suspended second deck on the narrow gauge branch is officially in service. Here's how it looks today:

It looks a lot more finished than it really is. After painting the surface of the 1" Gatorboard base with brown latex paint and sprinkling it with Woodland Scenics turf blends, we grabbed four chunks of previously used extruded foam scenery, trimmed the corners to fit the turnback curve, touched up the exposed edges with more paint and turf, added some smaller trees for a "forced perspective" effect, and dropped the scenery pieces on top of the flat shelf. Magic! Here's a photo of the foam scenery pieces during paint touch-up, before putting them back on the layout:

In the distant background is one of the footstools that are pretty necessary to see and operate on the upper deck, which is too bad, but on the other hand it's great to have a place to run narrow gauge trains to, and have them be able to turn around and come back from. We decided to name the town "Opportunity" - partly because that's a real town near a famous smelter in Montana vaguely on the way between Washington State and Colorado, and partly because it fits in with the feeling of the other narrow gauge towns on this fictitious line - Paradise and Hope. 

"Track is scenery" means that I also took the time, after forming the flextrack pieces to the right curvature and length, to remove them to the spray booth and coat them with flat weathered-wood shade spray paint. Here's a picture of the peices drying on a bright yellow dropcloth afterwards, and the spray booth afterwards, before the final tracklaying:

Not shown are the ten switches, which I also spray painted in the booth before tracklaying. To lay the track on the Gatorboard, I drilled out small holes in some of the ties, the size of MicroEngineering medium spikes, and pushed the spikes through the ties into the top surface of the Gatorboard. I plan to go back and glue down the track more permanently with liquid latex after we've operated enough trains up there, and designed enough scenery and buildings, that we can commit to the track layout.

Speaking of operations, I also (somehow) found room on the front fascia of the deck below to install ten more car card boxes and labeled them appropriately. The town of Opportunity is officially open for business!