Moving at double-time

Its been almost six months since something moved on this layout - I was trying to show my brother a train moving over Christmas and found that the soldering of wires from my two transformers into the block switchbox are a bit flakey and of course there was scenery in progress everywhere, so little movement was had.

But since I was helping a local fellow out with getting his layout moving yesterday, why not do the same with mine.

It turns out that one of the transformer input pairs is fine, so half an hour was spent cleaning tracks and running a pair of locos around. A small tweak needed to be made to a section of track in the yard where things would sometimes pop off, and some scenery had to be trimmed back for more clearance for the uphill track at the Wattenger Tunnel portal and at a bit of glue-shell scenery covering part of the upper spiral.

But soon enough I had a pair of trains running reliably - one up and one down:

I suppose a vid should have been taken of them crossing, but we might save that for another time. 

Some findings:

1. The locos still sound like English Electric diesel locos.
2. On the plus side, it still works, despite the incursion of scenery around the bottom track.
3. The trains run really well (again despite the above).
4. Its generally a mistake to push the trains through tight curves as the couplers complain.
5. Some of the wagons are light and temperamental unless at the back of trains. A shame that I can't add weight because:
6. There's no way to run the length of trains I'd really like to today on these grades - the stock locos don't have enough weight.
7. My two BLS locos run at quite different speeds, despite being based upon the same Marklin model. Must keep running them in and might have to use diodes to slow the fast one down (although the slow one is really quite slow).