Say if you have 2 or more ballasted tracks lined up next to each other and you want to fill in the bare wood spots with cinders, should you use the same texture size as your ballast, or should you go smaller?
Right now my tracks are ballasting with WS medium size 50/50 cinders and light grey mix. The color and texture looks perfect. Now I want to fill in the spots between the tracks, should I go with WS fine size cinders or will this look out of place next to larger size ballast on the tracks?
I guess it depends on the local/typical size of each product rendered by their respective ‘plants’. In western British Columbia, the ballast is locally harvested from hillsides or pits, crushed locally, and trucked to where it is needed in ballast spreaders. I liberated a single piece from the facility at Wallachin (wall-a-SHEEN) feeling that the CPR was full of largess that day. I’m pretty sure, at least. [:D] Anyway, it measures just over two inches wide and about 1 3/8" wide, and about 3/4" thick. I am sure it is representative of that facility’s product, but make no claims for the product elsewhere.
On my layout, I used beach sand. It is not coarse, but is not what I would call fine. WS fine cinders are comparatively less than half the size of the beach sand grains. I feel this is probably close to prototypical, although some cinders would have been larger.
They are found liberally applied in this photo of my yard, but I have them sprinkled all around my main, too.
-Crandell
Smaller. What you’re looking is called the “toepath” and it’s surfaced with what is called “subballast.” On a modern railroad that actually has a true subballast, it extends beneath the ballast and consists of a crushed rock product with fines that is roll-compacted to provide a water-resistant layer that water draining throught the ballast section will sheet-flow on its surface and into the ditches to each side, as well as to provide a load-bearing layer that will spread the load of the train on the track onto the embankment. Because subballast is also compacted and not composed of loose rock, it’s much easier to walk on safely, so it is commonly used today to surface yards and areas where people have to walk.
In old days when we used cinders (a terrible material, but cheap), the cinders were used to form the toepath but usually did not extend beneath the track, except if they were also in use as the ballast of the track. In the absence of cinders, pit-run gravel or road-base material will work – whatever can be obtained locally and most important, cheaply.
RWM