What type/color ballast would be accurate for an ho scale layout, modeling the B&M that ran between North Boston and Exeter, NH? Would a brown/earth tone work? Medium, fine, or large?
I don’t know about the B&M, but the NE railroads I have seen use a gray ballast. As for size, go to your LHS as see what they have. I think mine is medium.
sfb
Woodland Scenic has a variety of colors from light gray to dark gray and brown colors. I use fine grade ballast but that is my personal preference. You can by smaller bags for ballast, so grab a few colors and grades and see which you like because if you dont use it for ballast it, it works great for gravel piles, gravel roads and parking lots or for small rock slides on hills.
ColourS are the same as anywhere…
Start with the clean colour(s) of the RR’s regular supply. If this is limestone it will usually be a shade of grey. If it it granite it will be a variation of grey with pink, blue, purple or green - or any mix.
From there the colour will start to weather in. The new rock itself will usually darken. (If you look at any rock that has been exposed for some time it will usually be darker than the same rock if you split it to create a new face).
Weathering includes all sorts of “contamination” from atmospheric (smoke) through vegetable (leaves) to traffic deposits (anything spilling from trains).
Then there is maintenance or lack of it. The older track gets the dirtier it can become but cleaning it and topping it up with new ballast will modify the colours back towards new colours.
New ballast also has a larger grain size and more angular (sharper) grains. When dropped it will have a more open texture even when it has been consolidated by a whacker machine.
The older ballast gets the more it gets the edges knocked off, compacted down (unless it is tamped or hand worked back loose - to help drainage - and the more dirt ir will get in it. Over a very long time with little maintenance and top up ballast size can get very small – but the main things are 1. it will get smaller, smoother and darker. 2. it will get dirtier with a pretty uniform local dirt colour. 3. it will get shaken/packed down. These all add up to older ballast having a more closed overall texture that is darker so that it reflects less light back from fewer different surface angles… so it will look a more solid and darker grey/possibly brown.
Any new material will differ from this. The main thing being the amount of light reflected back from the greater variety of different faces. This will make it look like larger more loose/open material.
So the answer to your question is to first figur
It is curious that when you search for “ballast” on the Walthers website search function, you find some of it under Track & Accessories and other under Scenery.
Unless Arizona Rock is available, I like the Highball brand, which is also real rock, and I like the smaller size, so in HO I use what they call N scale ballast (even some Z scale!). The larger size, such as Woodland Scenics Medium, looks right to the naked eye but oversize in a good photograph – the size of a large softball! I try to think in terms of how small a scale figure’s hand is, and then think how many pieces of real ballast I can hold in my hand.
As to color, this can change by era and location. I am most familiar with midwestern railroads but even then here in Milwaukee the Milwaukee Road used to be known for an almost white rounded pebble ballast, then dark gray granite, and the Soo and then CP used still a different shade of rock ballast. I even have some shots where old ballast meets new ballast – and it looks too goofy to want to model.
If you are a Boston & Maine fan, do you have the Morning Sun color books for your favorite location and era. Not many guys deliberately shoot ballast photos (I used to do so by accident when changing film [%-)] ) but I have found that Morning Sun books are a very useful source of info for ballast colors
Dave Nelson