The final stage, ballasting
Ballasting track is one of my least favourite aspects of building a layout, ballasting single or double track isn’t too bad, but a large yard is a different matter. When I began laying the yard trackage, I was thinking about how I was going to ballast such a large area and achieve the effect that I wanted. I also had bad memories of ballasting the original section of the layout, ballasting the points was a nightmare.
The main difficulty is that the ballast in a yard is totally different to running track ballast, it may have looked similar when first laid, but over the years the ballast seems to disintegrate into dirt with a few stones mixed in, this ballast in some cases actually covers the sleepers so that the track seems to be imbedded in it. How do you replicate this appearance? Research i.e. the Internet, produced a variety of approaches such as plaster, grout and various odd fillers of various types, none of them appealed. What I wanted was a material that had the texture of yard trackage that could be worked into place like normal ballast and held in there by latex scenery cement.
The yard that I’m ballasting is quite large, so whatever I used I would need a lot of it.
I went to a landscaping outlet at Capalaba; they have numerous large bins of dirt gravel and sand etc. I took some plastic bags with me and spent a lot of time checking the colour and texture of different products, in the end I came away with small samples of grey and brown material. I had already decided the yard and main line would use grey ballast, but I have some sidings and a branch line that required brown ballast.
I sieved it through different size sieves and rather than apply it to the layout I pinned some short pieces of track to a board and tried it out.
I really liked the result of a product called road base, so I went back to Capalaba with a bucket. I went to the office and asked how much would a bucket of road base cost, the woman behind the counter thought I meant the 2 mtr. bucket on their machine and quoted accordingly, after she finished laughing she charged me one dollar.
The yard ballast is mid-grey and is applied the same way as track ballast, lay the ballast and spray with water containing detergent and then apply the cement. I sieved it down to a fine texture but not so smooth that the texture has been lost i.e. it doesn’t look like plaster.
One of the unexpected advantages is that using a slightly coarser sieve results in track ballast that looks far better than most of the commercial products available, the individual grains have clean sharp edges just like the prototype.
I’ve also found an easier way to ballast points without the scenery cement affecting the moving parts. While it took two weeks to complete all of the ballasting I did manage to ballast 15 points in half a day, after drying overnight every set of points worked perfectly first time.
So I paid $13.95 for the scenery cement and $1 for the ballast, however I haven’t yet found a way to speed up the process of ballasting, but the end result makes a huge difference to the realism of the layout.
Ballasting track is one of my least favourite aspects of building a layout, ballasting single or double track isn’t too bad, but a large yard is a different matter. When I began laying the yard trackage, I was thinking about how I was going to ballast such a large area and achieve the effect that I wanted. I also had bad memories of ballasting the original section of the layout, ballasting the points was a nightmare.
The main difficulty is that the ballast in a yard is totally different to running track ballast, it may have looked similar when first laid, but over the years the ballast seems to disintegrate into dirt with a few stones mixed in, this ballast in some cases actually covers the sleepers so that the track seems to be imbedded in it. How do you replicate this appearance? Research i.e. the Internet, produced a variety of approaches such as plaster, grout and various odd fillers of various types, none of them appealed. What I wanted was a material that had the texture of yard trackage that could be worked into place like normal ballast and held in there by latex scenery cement.
The yard that I’m ballasting is quite large, so whatever I used I would need a lot of it.
I went to a landscaping outlet at Capalaba; they have numerous large bins of dirt gravel and sand etc. I took some plastic bags with me and spent a lot of time checking the colour and texture of different products, in the end I came away with small samples of grey and brown material. I had already decided the yard and main line would use grey ballast, but I have some sidings and a branch line that required brown ballast.
I sieved it through different size sieves and rather than apply it to the layout I pinned some short pieces of track to a board and tried it out.
I really liked the result of a product called road base, so I went back to Capalaba with a bucket. I went to the office and asked how much would a bucket of road base cost, the woman behind the counter thought I meant the 2 mtr. bucket on their machine and quoted accordingly, after she finished laughing she charged me one dollar.
The yard ballast is mid-grey and is applied the same way as track ballast, lay the ballast and spray with water containing detergent and then apply the cement. I sieved it down to a fine texture but not so smooth that the texture has been lost i.e. it doesn’t look like plaster.
One of the unexpected advantages is that using a slightly coarser sieve results in track ballast that looks far better than most of the commercial products available, the individual grains have clean sharp edges just like the prototype.
I’ve also found an easier way to ballast points without the scenery cement affecting the moving parts. While it took two weeks to complete all of the ballasting I did manage to ballast 15 points in half a day, after drying overnight every set of points worked perfectly first time.
So I paid $13.95 for the scenery cement and $1 for the ballast, however I haven’t yet found a way to speed up the process of ballasting, but the end result makes a huge difference to the realism of the layout.
