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Also, you might consider placing some uprights to hold up a backdrop panel, unless you have the requisite permissions to go ahead and paint your walls sky blue! A simple light blue sky does wonders for extending your railroad real-estate. To get a smooth, seamless backdrop, though, requires some forethought. Now, as I mentioned in my other post, I don't know how you intend to do the scenery, but if you want a little relief (in the sculptural sense of the word), you'll need to either cut away some of the plywood from your top, or you could do what I do. My approach is to create a level, flat top like this, and then build up from it: all my subroadbed is lifted off of it by a small amount. I use 1/2" foamcore (I model in N-scale, this might be too flimsy for a larger scale) which I can cut easily with a utility knife or X-acto, to any shape needed. I place foamcore supports at 1-foot intervals or wherever necessary, again cut with a knife, and then I use expanding foam insulation (like what you seal the cracks around a door frame with - "Great Stuff" at hardware stores) to fill in around and under the remainder of the foam. Because it expands, it fills up the space between table top and foamcore roadbed, but you have to have some heavy books like encyclopedias to weight it down, to prevent the foam from warping things. I use Great Stuff also as my base for scenery; it carves easily with a large kitchen knife once cured, and as it cures it expands into funky blobby shapes. You can usually find some interesting scenic features in amongst all those blobs, and if it gets out of hand you can just carve it back with the knife. The rigid piece of foam that you carve away can be reused somewhere else, by inserting it into freshly-applied Great Stuff; I "recycle" like this so that I don't waste foam by building up solid mountains; you can stitch together the discarded slivers to make a shell. The beauty of this method is that it is all easily worked with non-powered cutting tools, and it can be easily reworked even long after the track is in place and running. Plus, it is lightweight, which is a factor for me. And, you can make hills of any shape, and let them plunge below the track height at whim; a drainage ditch is as simple as two angled cuts with the kitchen knife.
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