So I cracked... and started making a 3d board for my son and I to play on.
I've just been winging it in any spare time I have, I didn't make templates or even have a plan to be honest... I just sat there with ruler, pencil and xacto and started cutting foam. It's pretty "rough and ready" on the outside, and I'm totally flying by the seat of my pants on the interior... but I think it's going to turn out pretty well in the end!
Here is the engine of the train. The roof and front wall are removable to reveal the tile inside. As I was making it up as I went I left some pretty sizable gaps that needed to be filled with some flexible tile grout stuff I had to hand.

Here it is all filled with grout. It was still pretty rough so I decided to add some plasticard panelling to pull it together and distract the eye a bit. I'm really not fussed about the exterior toooo much, so I'm not spending hours on this part.

Here is the afformentioned panelling (I also added a nose bit because I thought it needed something more):

Time to do the interior of the tile... I worked from the game tile but obviously took a lot of liberties with the design. I think I retained the feel of the tile pretty well all told.

Then it was time for some paint to see how things were looking! I did a bit of rough and ready weathering just by blasting it with black and silver with my airbrush to give it some streaky lines. When I'm done making all the carriages I will pay the exterior more attention, but I didn't want to push too far ahead until I had all the roof pieces finished.

Then I painted the interior, first basecoats:

Then a bit of shading and highlighting (a mix of manual drybrushing and some airbrushing)

Then finally I added some little details like a paper wanted sign, some engine schematics and a little plasticard wrench. The oil patches are PVA and acrylic paint mixed together to make them nice little raised puddles.

With that done I moved onto making more carriages. First the passenger car. I've only done one side of each tile to allow space for the miniatures. I've tried to retain the vibe of the tile whilst making the sacrifices needed to go 3d. Again, I only spent about an hour or two total on each carriage so it's not particularly fine work.. I haven't any time at the moment for making things perfectly... I am intending to paint it all nicely and add details that way where needed. The 1cm foam I used is also not as forgiving as the thicker stuff and goes very fluffy if you try to sand it too much to smooth details out.

Next up was the Stock car (i think that's the name?) A lot of the details on this tile were obscured so I did my best to go with what I thought the intention was. A security/cargo carriage.

Then the dining car. The windows need some more sanding. When I paint I will make a starry background on a piece of card and glue it to the outside of the carriage.

Each carriage of the train has an identical roof so the tile is obscured There will be dozens of imperfections that will give away which tile it is, if you care to know, but my son and I won't pay any attention to that, we will just shuffle them around on the table, build the train and find out which carriage is next as we go.

This is where I'm up to so far then... currently I've only got enough foam left for one more carriage so I'm going to do the caboose. Then when I have some more time I will pick up another sheet of foam and make the remaining cars.
