The idea behind this environment was to create an airport set in the time period of the old west. The initial concept had an oval ring of railroad track around which a locomotive would pull the planecart until it picked up enough speed to take off.
Unable to model and texture that entire scene in the amount of time that I had, the idea was reworked into a set of train tracks that went off a cliff, allowing a plane/train to pick up speed on the tracks before plummeting over the edge and (possibly) taking flight.
The scene was created with Maya and textured in Photoshop. Click the numbers to see the rendering process.