Tyson, Shamus, Casey, thanks! In regard to the ballast, I was surprised how good it looked in the photos, I had been disappointed with it when I did it. There had been a thread on ballasting where someone (Charlie?) suggested using alcohol with some india ink to make ballast look older. I thought that sounded like a great idea and since the area in the photos had been ballasted a while back(I ballast after gluing down ties but before laying rail) it was looking a little worse for the wear and I decided to reballast over the existing ballast. Well, it worked ok in the end, but here's what happened that I hadn't expected. I had put the new ballast down and had it the way I wanted. I mixed some black and a tiny bit of sienna to some alcohol and sprayed the ballast to prepare it for gluing. The new ballast absorbed (or took) the coloring more readily than the old ballast, which made sense since the old ballast wad already sealed to some extent by glue. I wound up with quite a contrasty ballast job! Applying more of the alcohol/paint mixture with a brush on the older ballast only wound up giving me decent results.
Now, since Tyson has encouraged me, and because I'm in one of those moods where I'm to lazy to do actual work, I've looked thru past shots which were rejected as not good enough and have selected the following to post. The JGL gone modern! Itried but couldn't resist the temptation to buy these locos totally inappropriate for my chosen era. Oh well!