Neat dynasty. I'm a bit of an amateur photographer myself and especially like doing landscapes. However, I've never really figured out the digital darkroom like I should. I can see the examples in the book and they always say do this or do that until it "looks right". I suppose it's the computer programmer in me who craves things to be logical and therefore structured and defined when it comes to what I should be doing, rather than doing things in "skoshes" or "hairs" or whatever.
I can look at something in Photoshop Elements forever and still not be sure whether I've done it right or not (of course, I can see when I mess up...
).
At any rate, your last image was pretty good, but maybe a little too much on the ethereal side of things. The tracks themselves look quite alright, but the slight fuzziness and brightness of the distant objects like the sign and the buildings seem incongruous with the subject matter. Railroads are by nature generally dirty, grungy places. At least to me. It doesn't seem quite...real enough somehow. It could be the compression for web delivery had something to do with that. Images crunched down to web jpgs tend to lose something in the fine details.