Thank you again, Elliot, for taking the time to share your adventures with us.
Your posts always are not only very informative regarding your progress, but also educational - how to do intricate and challenging tasks on a large scale; meaning magnitude .
You may have answered this before, but I cannot remember: I suspect that you do plan to ballast the visible track - At what phase of the construction do you plan to do so? I waited to ballast mine (about 3/4 of my 900+ feet of track is ballasted) until I had most of the scenery, buildings, etc., in place, and wished I had started sooner.
Alex