The area between mainline, gardens, and backdrop is pretty much taken care of now. In the last couple days I built the floor of the Koef shed and ballasted the tracks in the vicinity.
I used cork to raise the shed floor to the height of the track ties inside the shed, and covered them on the outside with styrene sheet. Between the rails I used Evergreen 0.010 x 0.150 styrene strips to cover the gap between rails and the stud contacts. For the gaps between the stud contacts I cut Evergreen 0.010 x 0.040 styrene strips to length with the NWSL Chopper, which allowed quick and accurate production of enough pieces. The sheets were glued in place with wood glue. Between the rails I used plastic cement. The 0.040 strips are a little bit too thin to match the stud width, but the gap is easily filled with some white glue and paint.
The bright white styrene was painted with Pollyscale Concrete, and later weathered with powdered pigments to create an oiled and dirty effect. I also filled the "under-concrete" gaps between the ties in the floor area with fine ballast. It would probably have been better to use another styrene strip to hide the gap and the rail mounting hardware.
Like in Emsingen I used Woodland Scenics brown medium ballast for the side-tracks and aimed for the "not so well maintained" look here as well. Below is a comparison shot of the Welztalbahn mainline on the left with nicely built up ballast, a ballasted side-track in the middle, and the unballasted track I started with on the right.
One last detail shot below. I need to do another pass and weather the track with a mixture from thinned acrylics to blend the colors together and get rid of the plastic sheen on the ties. I will likely do that only when I have either ballasted Talheim station to the left, or the industry tracks to the right of this scene, and have a large area to mess with.
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