I have fine and course ballast. Which is appropriate for HO?
Not the coarse, Mouse. Over several threads this past year, the majority seem to favour fine-to-medium, and many settle on the medium. Beach sand has worked very well for me, especially during the wetting and gluing…it was heavy enough to stay put.
What kind of look are you going for? Fine is usually for branch and secondary lines, while the course might look more realistic on the mainline. I heard somewhere that ballast for mainlines should be 2 scale inches. That seems to make sense to me.
Actually both, the fine ballast would be on less used branchs, and yards that were not reballasted often or at all and dirt and sand would fill in around the coarser ballast. The mainlines were better tended, re-ballasted and new ties laid with greater regularity thus the coarse ballast would be more appropriate on the mainlines.
Will
I use fine on my HO L&NE (Ludington and Nowhere Else). As someone else said here, even the medium is equivalent to the size of a football. I also use a product called Spectra Lock for ballast in the yard and at the sand mine. It is pure silica so you can treat it just like regular ballast. It comes in about a dozen colors. I used Antique White for the sand, Sand Beige for a darker, dirtier sand, and a 50-50 mixture of Platinum and Raven for the dirty gray ballast in the yard.
I buy it at the local Lowes where it it stocked with the other grout products.
It works great.
Jimbo