I have been working on an industrial siding in which the structure is very close to the aisle and the spur to it runs behind the building. For ballast, I created a mixture of several kinds of WS turf and fine ballast. This gave me a the look of a rocky dirt that I think looks about right for a spur track. I soaked it with water/alcohol and then dribble on the dilluted white glue like I would have for regular ballast. It has been down for several weeks now but I was adding another structure to the end of the first one and I took a look trackside and noticed there is now about an 1/8" gap between the ballast and the structure with a perfectly straight edge. The structure was glued in place prior to the ballast and hasn’t moved so my guess is as this ballast mixture dried, it shrank and separated from the edge of the structure. I had never seen this happen with regular ballast so I’m wondering if this is the result of using the turf as a component of the ballast mixture. The track itself was glued to 1/8" extruded foam which is fairly smooth so I’m guessing the ballast didn’t have anything to grip to. This didn’t happen on the other side of the track where I have a parallel track with regular ballast overlapping the mixed ballast I used. It isn’t really noticable unless you move well up the track and look down the spur and the gap is easily filled in. I am just curious why this happened. Any thoughts.
What’s the building made of? Could it have sucked the water out of the ballast so that it dried funny?
You now have a great chance to add some detail to the ballast along the building edge![;)]