Building a Tunnel from a Chimney

First step cut a hole, then cut another hole. There you have it! A tunnel through a chimney! easy huh?

Well if you want to stop there that's your call BUT now you have a big gnarly hole that quite frankly looks pretty sucky. Guess we have to give it some sort of portal. But why stop there? We were planing on scenicing the whole railroad and a tunnel portal just sorta hang there on the side of the wall does look kinda silly. So I installed some Foam rockwork around it to give it some ZING. Yep that works but i still have this big gaping hole you can see into an d it doesn't look like a tunnel. Time to pull out those model mags again. Eureka they tell me I need a tunnel liner! But how to put in a tunnel liner on the other side of a wall? I can barely put my arm in to retrieve a lost car let alone do any actual work inside? Hum maybe if I bribe my 7 year old son with candy he can install the liner. No that wont work he's too short to even reach into the tunnel when standing on the scaffolding. guess i could form a 2 part liner. after all you can only see one side and the roof when on the ground. So that's what I did, at least on that side.

Now the other side was a little trickier. The hole we cut was smaller and i couldn't even put my arm into that one had to come up with a different idea. So I thought if I cant put a liner in this side I would just have to come up with a way to hide the tunnel. Model Railroader to the rescue again. There was a article about camouflaging the entrance to a tunnel by using trees. Well in O scale that's alot of trees but if i combined the trees with some sort of scenery like a hillside the viewer wouldn't see the tunnels hole. So I fabricated up some more of my foam mountains and extended them about 9" from the wall and walla NO more hole! Now i better start painting this thing.