We bought the lakehouse on Lake Lanier about 7 years ago.  When we bout the house it was decided to upgrade the house and improve the exterior as a first phase.  The house really needed an exterior lift and we decided to raise the roof and build a front porch.

At the time we bought the house I always had in the back of mind to build a model railroad layout and I thought that the outside of this house would work nicely.  Since we were designing a new front porch I decided to include a tunnell through the center of the porch from side to side to accomodate a garden model railroad.

I did not have a lot of experience with building a garden railroad but I did a lot of research and reading and found the optimum tunnel heigth and width.  I decided since I had not designed any part of the layout that I would be safe and design the width  to accomodate two tracks side by side.

The tunnel caused quite the curiousity by all that saw it as it looked very large for drainage and nobody could figure out what it could be used for.  After I explained about the model railroad they of course got even more interested.

I could not begin the layout work until we had completed all of the exterior work as ladders and a lot of construction would have trampled the railroad.  Well finally this past fall (Fall of 2014) we had finished the exterior work and we were ready for the model railroad.