A ballasting we will go......

Started to ballast the tracks. For those of you non-railroaders, ballast is the rocks you see between the ties and rails. On big railroads, the ballasting is very neat and tidy and each road uses what they think is the best rock. The RGS, being always a step away from insolvency, used whatever they could find. Dirt, rocks along the right of way, and my favorite - cinders from the locomotives. Locos burn coal to make steam, and have to dump their ash and cinders every so often to make room in the fire box. So the RGS just sort of scooped them up and used them in towns for ballast. I like the look so I use a blend of scale ballast - one HO scale cinders plus two bags of N scale cinders mixed together. The mix just seems to look right to my eye.

Once I spread the ballast between the rails and along the side, I use a small paint brush to work the ballast off the top of the ties and spread it as evenly as possible. Then a dose of 70% isopropyl alcohol to wet everything, and finally a dose of dilute white glue (Elmers) including a few drops of detergent to aid in penetration. Many folks use dilute matte medium for this as well. Other folks use water with a little detergent as the wetting agent but I have found that the alcohol penetrates better and faster and does not disturb the ballast. Learned that from Model Railroader magazine.

The scene in the blip is the depressed siding at Dolores that locomotives would back down into so their coal tender was a little lower. Then from the siding a man would shovel coal out of a gondola car and toss it into the tender. You can see the last guy was a little weak as some coal did not make the whole trip. Railroad ties hold back the earth on the left and in the foreground.

The buildings in the background are there for now - have to see how things work out. The one on the left is a old boxcar turned into a storage shed I built from an old Banta kit. The one on the right is a section shed.

Yesterday and today I also finished the roads Whew. Now on to more ballasting once my back fells better. I promised myself not to bring out the trains until all the track was ballasted, the layout border was painted, and I had thoroughly cleaned the track. So no trains for awhile.