The next step involves laying down a rubber foam track roadbed and a bit of smoothing of some curves.
If you have followed my work in the past, you will know that my favorite track foundation for all of my layouts is the rubber foam from Woodland Scenics and in this case I’m using the N-scale width roadbed as a foundation below the Rokuhan sectional track that has its own plastic roadbed. In the end, I’ll likely add gravel ballast in the final model to generally disguise the plastic roadbed. The purpose of the rubber roadbed foundation is to reduce the noise from running the trains on plastic track if mounted to a harder surface or the white foam that might transfer the vibrations to the wood foundation of the layout.
At this point, I’ve also found underground paths for passing the wiring associated with powering the track and operating the turnouts. I have placed power connections at five locations spread around the mainline to assure good power distribution. All of the wires will eventually be exposed at the middle back edge of the layout and will be connected to power and controls to be located in the shelf area, roughly where the Marklin power pack is sitting in the view above.
As I added the rubber roadbed, I took some time to smooth out sections of the mainline by reworking my use of available sectional track. All of the curves are either 45 or 30 degree sections with the only exception being the 490 mm curves used in the design (which are only 13 degree sections). At times I had to insert smaller straight sections, either 25 mm or 50 mm in length in order to get everything aligned.
The original plan included a valley through which the lower mainline passed under a pair of bridges of the upper mainline. Here, I’ve chosen to plan a tunnel section instead but I’m still wrestling with exactly where to locate the tunnel entrance on this side.