Mail And Express Service And Main Line Upgrades

Still working toward getting a regular mail and express train into operation, here is how I'm looking to bring it up. For reference, here is the track plan:

I basically have three destinations for mail and express cars. The biggest is the Railway Express Agency building in Manhattan Transfer:

This is a DPM Cuttings Scissor factory with some tweaks and a Bar Mills sign. Baggage-express cars can also be spotted on the platforms 1 and 2 in the Manhattan Transfer station:

The other destination is the Railway Express building in Zenith (actually East Zenith on the trackplan):

This is a Thomas Yorke G Street Warehouse kit with a Bar Mills sign.

What I intend to do for the next step in mail and express operation is to run a full M&E train from Manhattan Transfer to Zenith. I would expect this to have about 20 cars. It would run over the upper tier of the main via Tennessee Pass, East Portal, and Woollett to Zenith, where it would drop one or two cars for the REA depot and possibly the Zenith passenger station platform. Then it would reverse and run back to Manhattan Transfer via the same route, where it would be at least partly reassembled.

We had a lot of heating and plumbing work in the basement in 2015, and I'm still cleaning up the layout from this. In addition, with the layout now 20 years old, cork roadbed has dried out, warped, etc, and this causes problems with track that's code 70 on much of the upper tier. (On top of that, I didn't pay as much attention to leveling and alignment as I should have when I built the layout.) So part of the effort in getting things going will be to red-do some of the ballast and alignment:

You can see where I've raised and shimmed the track in the foreground to eliminate a low spot. The ballast is Arizona Rock & Mineral D&RGW red cinders.