Third rail was added to the layout prior to ballasting - by no means prototypically, by gluing Finetrax code 40 track directly to the sleepers adjacent to the existing rails (sorry!)

I tried to loosely stick to protocol by keeping the "live" track innermost within the bounds of the station, but on the curved sections the third rail is broken purely for visual interest (apologies again!)

Disaster struck after ballasting, the track was tested with loco's - and all was fine. However, when coaches were added the ride was far from smooth! I guess wagons and coaches have deeper wheel flanges, or just bump more because they are lighter...

The result was that the ballast of all the inner track had to be filed down, meaning a ruined paint job on the sleepers and a right mess being made of the ballast!

The only way to fix all this was to respray the whole track (and unfortunately the well established ballast as well) a uniform brown.

With a bit of dry brushing with a beige-ish shade and a rusty wash the flat dark brown was reasonably well salvaged. Bit of a compromise, but these things happen!