Around Wattinger Bridge

This rather convoluted episode will cover a number of different storylines around the Wattinger bridge. The real scene is pictured below. Forgetting about the building which we'll get to later, note the arched bridge, cliffs, distinctive stepped tunnel portal, river and foliage (albeit seen in autumn/fall here).

For the cliffs, I am using an idea seen on a Youtube video from "Marklin of Sweden" who shares some nice model rail tutorials on his channel. I think he's in HO scale, but they are full of good ideas and he's well worth a look for quirkiness value.

In his waterfalls video (which contains a number of interesting tips), he suggests expanded polystyrene foam for rockfaces, so given this is a lightweight layout, that might be worth a try.

I found some of the white bubbly stuff and made a big mess on the floor by slicing vertical lines at various angles and thinning the back to be left with this.

 Which was glued to the cliff face and pinned in place:

 And painted gray. As you can see, this actually happenned before the ballast went in...

Some thinned black paint was washed on board and a little white drybrushed on the pointy edges later on.

But in the interim, I found a fairly side-on pic of the bridge (taken from the upwater side) and photoshopped it into this:

One of these bridge sides was cut out, glued onto thin card, and pinned in place in the below pic. Printed out, they are a little redder in shade than I'd like, but this might have been my doing in Photoshop. Next time I'd probably try to add a bit more depth/texture contrast in luminosity.

As can be seen, with the ballast in place, a tunnel portal was cut out of a sheet of Slaters roof tiles and added into place. Almost all layouts need to be condensed down from the real thing, and here is no exception - you may note that my bridge needs to be almost S shaped to kink the track back around before the edge of the layout.

 A bit of foliage to conceal things and its looking OK:

A few other items of note: 

• I haven't modelled the underside of the bridge arch (the real one is concrete with stone facing apoplied on the sides), but the area 'under' the bridge has been painted quite dark, and dark foliage used.
• The previously mentioned blue-green pines have had a splash of a more yellowy-green shade applied. 
• The previously mentioned brighter green trees which looked a bit like saguaro cactuses have all been beefed out by putting a second tree 'inside' the first one to give it more branches.
• Darker bushes and tones have been used down in the shadows by the bridge and tunnel.

I still need to wash some light shading onto the tunnel portal to give it more texture, finish off a little more scenicking around the portal and decide what to do about further track weathering.