I enjoy making track look as real as possible with weathering and good looking ballast. It always seems to look better when it’s applied…before the adhesion process is employed. It gets all clumpy and hard to spread evenly when its wet. Also, the weathering comes off from all the brushing, trying to get the ballast away from the rails.
Is it a bad idea to apply ballast and leave it loose? Will it settle and look poorly after awhile? Would it be hard to clean after a few months? Anyone who has tried leaving ballast loose on the roadbed, let me know if it was successful. Thanks a lot.
I personally don’t see a problem with it being loose. If it is well groomed, off the ties, it should serve to look good just as if it were real. However, it may migrate due to vibration, and around turnouts that is not going to be desirable, as mentioned above. For me, the glued ballast means track stays put. I get no seasonal shifting once the glue has hardened. No track bowing or kinking.
One other trick I learned: dilute the glue quite a bit. I like my ballast to be relatively easily disturbed if I wish to drive something sharp and hard into it to raise a low rail, for example, and a solid hard block of sand and glue is not conducive to that process. I dilute my ballast glue to about 6:1 in favour of the water. I still don’t get any rail shifting with this lighter glue. Because it is lighter, it affects the look that much less. My beach sand ballast looks very much as it did prior to the glue treatment.
I agree with the others. Ballast that is left loose will be a problem with migration of the material, and it can get caught up in your switch points and the running gear of your locos too. In adition, if you need to clean your layout with a vacuum cleaner (and who doesn’t after a while), loose ballast will become a casualty of the cleaning.
Loose ballast will cause nothing but trouble. To the eye, it looks like a bunch of evenly size pieces, but there is probably a lot of small-sized dust in there, too, and that will play havoc with your locomotive gears.
Loose ballast wants to move downhill. It’s like a grainy liquid, and it will seek its lowest point, It won’t move unless disturbed, but running a train over it disturbs it. Why do you think real railroads have to spend so much effort maintaining ballast? It shakes, rattles and rolls and slides downhill. Eventually, you’ll have no ballast at the sides of your track.
You mentioned moving ballast around while it’s wet. Nope, you’re doing it wrong. Put the ballast on dry, arrange it perfectly, and add isopropyl alcohol, straight from the bottle, with a pipette, which is hobby-talk for “eyedropper.” The pipette applies small amounts of the alcohol without disturbing the ballast. The alcohol distributes itself, and acts as a “wetting agent” to help the glue flow through the ballast. After you’ve wet down a section, use the glue. I mix 1 part white glue to 3 parts water, and apply it from an Elmers bottle, again, drop by drop. After a while, you can do this pretty quickly. Wait a day for the glue to dry hard, (2 days in humid weather) and then remove errant pieces of ballast with a knife, vacuum the track to pick up strays, and clean the top of the rails. Done. Perfect ballast that won’t go anywhere in 1 paragraph.
Murphy says: “Yeah, go ahead and use loose ballast. Nothing will go wrong.”
Mister B has it right when he says don’t attempt to move wet ballast. [swg]
The key to getting loose-looking but well-bonded ballast is in the application of “wet-water”. I’ve posted this so many times that I finally saved it as a Word document. There are many methods for applying ballast, but this is one that has worked well for me:
I keep seeing comments about people dreading having to ballast their tracks, or, from people who’ve tried and not had success, about what a crummy task it is. What follows is my procedure for ballasting - there are others that work as well, but this one uses readily-available and cheap tools and materials.
The choice of ballast is up to you - I use Woodland Scenics Fine Ballast on my HO scale layout, but there are many other brands and sizes available, and plenty of colours. If you use natural materials, like sand, dirt, or decomposed rock, it’s best to use a magnet to remove any magnetic inclusions that might possibly damage the motors in your locos.
To ballast your track, I find that a small paper cup (such as those kitchen or bathroom Dixie cups) gives you great control over where the ballast goes. I usually move the cup along the centre of the track, tapping it as I go, to keep the ballast flowing. Less than you need is better than too much, although a soft 1/2" brush is useful for pushing around the excess or levelling what’s in place. Then go back and do both roadbed shoulders in turn. Use the brush to level and re-arrange things as required, making sure to keep the ballast away from the throwbar area and the flangeways of the guardrails. To remove stray ballast from the tie tops, lightly grasp the metal ferrule of the brush between the thumb and forefingers of one hand, laying the handle across the rail tops, then, as you move the brush along the tracks, lightly and rapidly tap the brush handle with the fingers of your free hand. The stray ballast will “magically” bounce off the ties and into place between them.
If y
Thanks, doctorwayne, I just copied that instruction into a Word document for future reference as one day I will be ballasting my track that is all installed and wired.
Dang right!, especially since the typical model railroad will have ballast shoulders at a 1-to-1 ratio (45 degrees) while the prototype uses something like 1-to-3. This is particularly apparent when using something like Woodland Scenes’s nut-shell ballast compared to real rock like Arizona Mineral. Get real! Use “real” ballast and fasten it down with diluted glue with a touch of detergent to break down water’s cohesiveness.
I agree with what has been said, to wit loose ballast will become a problem eventually, even if it isn’t at first. Glue it down.
However, I will offer one point of disagreement. I don’t believe that it is impossible to move wet ballast. In fact, my ballasting technique has evolved to the point that now I rely on it! See, I model in N-scale, and always hated it that my ballasting efforts could never come out looking as well-groomed as a Norfolk & Western (my prototype) mainline should. I could never avoid grains moving as I applied the glue, and often I ended up with a glued “shell” but loose ballast under, which would eventually crack open. For my N-Trak module I decided to experiment a bit, and the method proved so successful that now it’s the only way I work.
First of all, this is not a quick method, so if you’re not up for a little bit of tedium don’t bother. Second, it might be that this only works in N scale, or that it works best in N… because the width between rails is a match for the chubbiness of my fingers. Third, I do think it’s pretty certain that with more practice and the right tools (misting bottle, pipettes, etc.) I could achieve the same or possibly better results with conventional dry ballasting (to assign it a name). I’ll call my technique “slurry ballasting”.
Basically, what I do is drop on some glue+water+alcohol mixture onto the ties and cork, before any ballast is present. I spread this some with my fingers to get it more or less evenly distributed, working on a 4 to 6 inch section at a time. Then, using a spoon, I lay in some ballast. My ballast mix includes some very fine material (actually decorative sand from the art supply store) along with old fashioned Woodland Scenics and other packaged ballast products. As soon as the ballast goes down, it soaks up the glue and becomes a slurry, and from here it just becomes a matter of pushing and sculpting it into place. I use my finger
This thread has become a very good clinic on how to ballast correctly. Nice job, guys.
Wayne, let me ask you a question. When you are laying down the dry ballast, what technique do you use to keep the margins of the ballast looking even rather than ragged? And, once you do that, how do you keep the moistened ballast from running and ruining the evenness?
Ballasting is certainly one of the trickier aspects of modeling and you’ve gotten some good advice so far. As you can see, there are a few different techniques. In my case there are a few things to do that make it easier, at least for me.
-I find that ballast made from natural rock is a little easier to work with in that it is less prone to floating around during the wetting process. Arizona Rock and Mineral (www.rrscenery.com) and Smith and Sons are two brands that pop to mind.
-I find it easier if I do BOTH the wetting and adhesive application with a mister instead of a dropper or glue bottle. With droppers or glue bottles you have to work harder to keep little rivelets and canyons from forming. Beauty supply stores are good sources for cheap, fine mist bottles.
-For initial misting I prefer the alcohol/water mix recommended by the other posters. Start misting from about 15 inches up and as the ballast dampens drop down to about 6 inches. Don’t make the ballast so wet that puddles form.
-In the past year I’ve gone to using pre-mixed matte medium for the adhesive instead of white dilute white glue. Scenic Express offers it. Their brand has some additives that make application very easy. Here’s the link: http://www.sceneryexpress.com/prodinfo.asp?number=EX0020
This $20 jug lasts a LONG time. Personally, after using this saving a penny or two isn’t worth it as far as pre-mixing my own brew.
I apply the pre-mixed matte medium with a mister also in that the mister is less likely to disturb your ballast profiles. Mist on the dilute matte medium until you can see the white showing in the stone.
I have only read the OP’s posting, so my advice may be repetitive…
Two points… It sounds like you are wetting the ballast before its in place. A better method is to spread the ballast dry until you get it as you want it, and then dribble in a white glue/water mixture (or whatever).
Loose ballast surely can get into turnout points and loco running gear, etc. However, if you have long stretches of trackage without turnouts - that does not come into contact with 0-5-0 switchers - you could probably get away without adhesive. BUT, you need to carefully spread the ballast between the ties and outside the rails, and make sure that none is above tie level.
All that being said, I would still add the adhesive…
Rich, I seldom worry if the ballast margins are even, although they do seem to naturally end-up more-or-less that way. I’m looking for a physically well-maintained look, but not one that’s necessarily pristine in appearance. I’ve found that a 1/2" soft brush is useful for adjusting things when necessary. I usually place the adjoining ground cover at the same time I’m ballasting, too, and this can be a good way to help keep things looking even. I use the same paper-cup method for applying ground cover, which gives pretty good control, but you could make the application away from the previously straightened ballast edge, then push it into place with the brush.
This out-of-focus shot shows some of the irregularities. My main intent here was to get the look of a slightly elevated main line passing through an area of industrial sidings. There is no roadbed under any of the tracks - it’s all laid directly on the plywood:
Here’s the same area from “ground level”:
Where the roadbed is elevated (I use cork on 3/4" plywood subroadbed), I usually apply enough ballast so that it finds its own “angle of repose”. If I decide to also use cinder sub-ballast, it’s applied first, and only along the outer reaches of where I expect the final ballast shoulder to end up:
Thanks for that response and the photos of your layout. Beautiful work as always.
I have read some threads where people use different approaches to maintain margins such as paint sticks, straight edges, etc. On the one hand, it is interesting to me that you can accomplish realsitic ballasting using free form. On the other hand, I don’t know why it should surprise me since free form is the way it is done on the prototype.
Yes - this has been a very good thread with a ton of good information.
Cody Grivno has recorded his method of applying ballast - one of these recording is in Volume10 of the Dream Plan Build series - and I have seen it somewhere else, maybe on one of his Cody’s Office sequences. His method uses both Scenic Cement and diluted white glie to secure the ballast.
Ballasting is one of those things that either come naturally to you or like me you have to spend countless hours practicing techniques and tricks until you get it right.As soon as you mentioned clumpy ballast I have to ask are you using Woodland Scenics Ballast? I have nothing but bad luck with their stuff and clumps are and understatement mine resemble things the cat would leave behind.
I have greatly improved on my Ballasting jobs using both Smith ballast and Highball ballast.as well as Arizona Rock & Mineral’s ballast. The difference between these products and W/S ballast is that they are made from real rocks as W/S using a variety of things from ground walnut shells to cork from what they told me when I called their customer service department. Why not give one of those three a try before throwing in the glue bottle.For me I have found that 70% isopropyl alcohol works better as a wetting agent then wet water and for some reason Scenic Express’s Matt medium seems to wok better then 50/50 white glue and water. From what guys here have said the Matt Medium doesn’t dry as hard as white glue making it better for ballasting. But don’t leave it loose before you know it you’ll be cleaning up a continues mess
