Ballasting and OO

I was going to do it next year but i have decided to do some ballasting, mostly under the new bridge. It will be difficult to ballast when the bridge is completed so i decided to ballast it now. I've extended the ballast to cover the approach roads to the station and MPD. It all looks reasonably good... so far.

The bridge will be a railway bridge by the way. I will get some HO scale stock for it one day but for the moment a couple of carriages from my stored OO scale fleet are being used!

The bridge

A major new feature of the layout is a bridge that cuts across from one corner to the back scene wall. In doing so it crosses 3 tracks and will add a lot of interest (hopefully!) I've built in in wood and am applying card and plastic bricks to the outside. Well not too much so far, one thing i realised was that once the bridge was in place ballasting and scenery underneath the bridge would be very difficult so i've done the ballasting now in that part of the layout (wasn't planning on doing the ballasting until next year).

In other news the latest locomotive Maria has a fault, after a couple of minutes running it becomes very jerky before eventually stopping. I've stripped the loco down to see if anything is obviously broken but all seems fine on that score though it is a very tight fit inside so i've left a piece of the cab interior moulding out to see if that solves the problem.