I really like the look of prototypical double-stacks leaning around a super-elevated curve, such as I’ve seen many times on UP tracks along the Salton Sea, and so thought I would model the same in the new extension to my layout. Wrong. A couple weeks ago a friend brought his big, beautiful MTH GS-6 to run on my layout for the first time. He ran it along that super-elevated stretch, and bingo, the GS-6 leaned so far, that it tipped over even though none of my trains had ever done that! I was then told by another friend that super-elevation is not necessary in a garden layout and, in fact doesn’t work. So on this beautiful day, I worked over that section of super-elevated track, and leveled it out. I used the opportunity to install several culverts - a section of electrical conduit - one of which you can seen beneath ballast on each side of the track in this pic.
And as long as the camera was in hand, I took a pic of my Howe truss bridge, which had just received a coat of Thompson’s water seal prior to getting several coats of Varathane in the coming days and then being repositioned in the layout. There it is occasionally bombed by big navel oranges falling from the tree overhead, so I’ve had to replace several struts with unweathered redwood. Next orange season, I’ll put a plank atop the bridge!
