My Layout progress

Here's a few pictures of a small area of my layout, on which I've recently done some work. (only a little).
As you may know from my previous posts, the track is on 5mm thick woodland scenics foam roadbed.
The area around the loco servicing facility has tracks more or less embedded in the ground around it, so I raised the areas next to the tracks by glue-ing down a few strips of cardboard, and I used masking tape to make some smoother transitions. After that, I used plaster (Plaster of Paris or similar) to smooth over the surfaces. (I masked off the tracks too, so that I would not get any accidents with plaster dropping on the track etc) I added a few drops of brown paint to tone it down and make it less white, but I didn't add enough so it is still quite bright. This is not a problem, as the next step will be to coat another layer of earth colour latex emulsion paint, on which I will add the base ground cover (mainly sand in my case) while still wet. I'll take pictures of that process so you can all learn from the things that go well, and the things that go wrong. :-)

I've also added a manual switch mechanism to one of the turnouts here, similar to the mechanism shown in the you tube video of my modeling friend Mike, a few posts below. All I still need to do is add the microswitch for the power to the frog of the turnout.