A couple weeks ago, I identified an issue with the Zephyrette getting stuck on one of the Brancheline tunnels. We removed the support pillar that the Zephyrette was hitting. Orion repainted it, and I glued it back today:

The engine is still barely closing the tunnel wall, but at least it doesn’t hit the support pillar anymore. That’s how close I’m talking about:

In the picture above, you can clearly see the timber support that looks freshly brown painted on the left of the engine. It was aligned with the tunnel wall, and I reglued it about 5 millimeters inside. There’s probably just enough clearance for a page from le bottin téléphonique, and not much more. Sorry, French joke, and no I won’t explain it.

OK so I thought that was the end of it but no… The Zephyrette was still having trouble and once in a while, it would fail its automation run, get stuck somewhere on the canyon block, and the automation would bring it back home. It happened every 4 or 15 other runs, not every single time. Took me a while to figure where that was since by the time the automation would tell me there was an issue, the engine would be back at its parking spot. I finally managed to reproduce the issue. Turns out the Zephyrette was getting stuck on the other side of that tunnel. Here’s the spot, and how I fixed it:

See the white marks on the first and second timber supports of the tunnel? That’s where it was rubbing, but just a fraction of a millimeter. So it turns out that if the engine had enough speed, it would overcome that easily. On that spot, I couldn’t just remove the timber supports and reglue them further inside like I did on the other side. So instead I used an x-acto knife to separate the timber support from its base and push it inwards. That’s just enough -- just a fraction of a millimeter -- to prevent the Zephyrette from rubbing against it.

Problem fixed.