A while back there was a great posting on track ballasting. The author used fine ballast. I was not ready to do my ballasting at the time, but had purchased coarse and medium ballast.I was going to mix the two then apply. My question is: Should I use only a fine ballast, or can I use the mixture of coarse and medium ballast I had planned on using? Thanks.
Why don´t you take a piece of track and ballast it with the mix you have - if you like the looks of it, it´ll be OK! It always take a little experimenting to find out what YOU like.
I mix Woodland Scenics fine ballast with some sand that I get from the sand tubes I buy every year (yes, it snows where I live). The sand is about the size of medium ballast. Mixing it with the WS ballast helps the ballast stay put when I’m wetting it, and gives it some variety in size.
To use sand from sand tubes takes a little preparation. I’ve glued a strong magnet to a piece of 3/8" dowel. After I pour some of the sand into a smaller container, I run the magnet through it. You’d be surprised at how many filings are in that sand. Yeah, I know, it sounds like a hassle, but I can buy 70# of sand for about $1.88.
In my experience, mixing fine with medium or mixing medium with coarse doesn’t work well because two different grades don’t mix well or, at least, they don’t seem to mix evenly. Plus, I personally don’t think that the mix of two different grades looks all that good. If you only use one grade without mixing, then the choice of grade is personal preference, but I think that medium looks best, and most prototypical, on HO scale track.
Rich