Using Woodland Scenics ballast what size is best for HO scale
Fine, Medium, or Coarse?
The fine is best, or medium is OK. The coarse scales out to cobblestones in HO and looks much better in O
In HO, WS medium ballast scales out to between 3 and 4 1/2 inches. Which is good for road ballast. The fine between 1 and 3 inches, which is good for the walking ballast typically used in yards.
Personally, I like to look of medium. Fine just doesn’t have enough texture for my taste.
Nick Brodar
I like the look of the fine in HO.
I’ll vote for fine in HO too.
I use med,But its all on what you want it to look like,you can play with a sample of the 3 to see what you want .i use fine for roads,that way when it comes up to a rr crossing with med looks more realistic.(think of a real rr, does a gravel road use the same size
rock as a real rr ballast) just a thought
good luck
Carl…
Fine is just about perfect for HO scale ballast (in N, it’s too big!).
Here’s a way to make sure the ballast you want to use is the right size: wander out to your local ROW with a HO scale figure and a small pile of ballast. Look at the models, and then look at what you’re standing on. If they scale out the same, then the ballast is the right size.
I personnally would never use anything larger than Woodland Scenics FINE.
I take one bag of light gray fine and one bag of medium gray fine and put them in an old coffee can. I then shake to mix and use this for my mainlines.
I use Highball N scale cinders for my yard areas. It’s even finer than WS fine.
I would say go with fine, but this is your choice. Take two short peices of track, lay them down as you would on the railway, and ballast one with fine and the other with medium. Wait a day and see which one you like more.
Trainboy
The real stuff passes through a 2" mesh and starts life not less tha 1.5"… so all you need is a scale rule…
David is correct…and that means fine, if that is the look you’d like. So, whaddaya want…prototypic scale, or looks, maybe both? Your choice.
None of it. Try N scale ballast with HO, it’s much more prototypical.
Being an analyst from way back, I spent hours and hours on this one. While the fine is certainly prototypical for HO, I think this is a case where the medium looks better. The fine, when glued down, even with matte medium which distorts the “finish” even less than diluted Elmer’s glue, just looks too smooth…not enough texture. But as we all know, it’s our railroad and we gotta do what looks best to us.
Hope this helps.
Mondo
The “walking” ballast somtimes used in yards and to form trackside walkways is (in this country) “Meldon Dust”… and just that. It will pass through a 1/4" grid… try that to scale! 
I’d start by using an extremely fine sandpaper… any colouring will reduce the apparent texture / grain size.
Then again… once it gets compacted and/or other stuff in it, it becomes pretty much a smooth surface like asphalt…
One guide (if you can get to a safe location) is to walk up not looking at the material you are interested in (surprisingly hard to do) stop, close your eyes, open them and see how much impact that material / subject makes in your view. The clever bit is to NOT look directly at what you are interested in. …it’s a bit like night vision … you can do it… but HOW?
I guess the reverse is that when you first look at a photo of the model (which concentrates the image) you don’t want things like the ballast to leap out at you… try putting a similar picture of the real thing next to a picture of the model.
I think that it’s the same with weathering.
Which means that you sometimes want the stuff to leap out and hit you… probably only when it’s supposed to be new.
After all this stuff on ballast I’m so hoping to see lots of models with diffferent ballast and ties on different parts of the trackwork.
Any tips on weathering ballast with a brush?
Trainboy
Use Burnt Umber and some dark grey, even add a little flat black, and make a wash out of it. Not a weathering wash, something about twice as strong. Then, apply it in a way that gives you the control you’d like (I did use a watercolour-type paintbrush), and colour the ballast inside the rails, and out to the edges of the ties. It will seep outward to the distance that looks natural. Later, when that dries, use a heavier black wa***o mark up a central drip line inside the rails, especially if in the transition era and earlier.
Thanks, selector. I’ll try that.
So far I’ve tried a wash of polly s Grimy black, and that looks great on the red ballast, but not on the gray.
Trainboy
Why are you mixing such different colours of ballast?
It could happen… but usually a RR would get all of it’s ballast in any one area from pretty much one source.
Ballast is HEAVY so it is usually only moved as far as it has to be.
It might come from a number of quarries but these wold be likely to be in much the same rock type unless you are in an area of very variable geology… you might get a mix of something like a hard limestone with a volcanic intrusion nearby… but I don’t know US geology (It’s hard enough working out which way round your country is… we (well I) think north-south… the USA goes an awful long way east-west).
Another possibility is a shift from furnace slag ballast to limestone. This would be blue/black to white becoming grey… but the blue black could be all sorts of colours including red depending on the origin of the slag.
I’m not saying you’re wrong… just trying to help out with detail. The first issue with all ballast colour is where the rock came from… in modern track. You’d pretty much have to go back before 1900 to get other than rock ballast unless the line was very cheap/broke, temporary or (maybe) serving a quarry/mine and using tailings.
I suggest that you look back through my earlier posts.
I like the notes on weathering ballast.
may I suggest…
- Decide on what your new ballast colour would be… depending on source… look at
any examples of new work on your favourite road and in any MoW cars.
A. Then decide what way the colour is going to develop over time…events… and… - Decide if there have been any big changes … i.e. material type/colour.
- Decide how old the ballast is.
a. Heavier use/more profitable lines get re-ballasted more often.
NOTE… a massive hauler would have massive track… you don’t want to put a
Challenger in the dirt… so, subject to getting in between the trains the big coa
I put down ballast tha matches the surrounding rock, and I think it’s working. Red ballast in Red Rock Canyon, Gray in the gray rocked town of Virginia, and dark brown everywhere else.
Trainboy
“I put down ballast tha matches the surrounding rock, and I think it’s working. Red ballast in Red Rock Canyon, Gray in the gray rocked town of Virginia, and dark brown everywhere else.”
Seems pretty good
I guees that the short version of my last is that the colour of weathering is the reverse to what we usually expect… light shows up on dark for ballast… the new shows on the old.
Hey! that was short!