Freight House and Station Platform Progress

I have been working on the station-freight house-section house area with the umpteenth attempt to get the ground profile between the freight house and the section house right. I am not really there yet but getting closer. 

Note that closer examination of photos of the section house from 1962 when the yard was being torn out showed that I needed to build a cutout to the kitchen/garage part of the building with sloping stairs down to the ground behind the station which is at freight platform level (4 feet above track level).  As part of this effort I built the rest of the freight platform and the ramp down to track/ground level. This is on my workbench with a mockup of the station building wall.

This is a view showing the freight house and freight platform on the layout and a comparison to a photo from Bob Morris's Port Costa collection. The station is another mockup stand in I have been using for almost a year to get the right windows Tichy and Grandt line windows to fit the prototype.  The corrugated shed at right is still a crude representation but the sand house behind is now painted. 

I still need the finial for the freight house and one to go on the end of the station building. Ballasting will not be completed until the mainline tracks have been laid and ballasted along with most of the details out to the waters of the Carquinez strait. Until then all structures and land forms remain removable.  The stake bed truck is actually an inexpensive Oxford  4 mm scale coal merchant Bedford model. English prototypes are small enough that they don't look too out of place.

This is an overall view of most of the layout.  

Note the mirror behind so I have a reversed view from the other direction. 

Also the M-4 2-6-0 1685 now has a working TCS KA2 and glides through turnouts nicely so it can be used for switching Port Costa. I recently came across a 1950 photo of 1685 at Gerber working the west line up the Sacramento Valley with an identical R-90-7 tender. The 2-6-0 M-4 is an IHC plastic RTR from the 1990's that has been modified a bit. I doubt I will find a painted, DCC wired affordable brass M-6 anywhere soon. 

I need to look at long last at building the turntable pit and bridge. On this small layout it will be mostly cosmetic and hand operated. At least I should paint the plastic disk that represents the turntable a concrete grey.  I have also started building part of the forest of poles that carried steam lines to buildings from the roundhouse boiler, sand lines from the sand house and a huge web of telephone and telegraph wires.