Ballasting Part 1

To me, the most daunting part of the construction of the layout has been the ballasting.  This week I decided to face my 'Sword of Damocles' and take a stab at ballasting Carstenbahn One.  I initially purchased some paint and painted the styrofoam roadbed.  Fear not, friends, it wasn't nearly as orange as the camera makes it out to be!

 So the plan was to lay the track, add ballast, and then spray the whole thing with matte medium to hold the whole shebang in place.  Well, I decided to try a different method, one I eluded to in an earlier post, and one that served me well in H.O. scale, namely slopping on large amounts of paint, pressing the track into the wet paint, and simply spreading the ballast across everything.  Then, after the paint has dried, vacuuming up the excess ballast and only having ballast between the ties and around the track.

The ballast I used is called poultry grit, or chicken grit.  A 25lb bag can be found at Tractor Supply Company for $9, and I will probably need 3-4 bags for the entire layout.  This is probably the cheapest ballasting material you can find, and look very realistic, too.

I started by making a couple of test cases, both with the brown paint and also a batch of dark gray paint I also had plenty of:

I used the same technique as I have described - press the track into the wet paint, add ballast, wait for the paint to dry, and vacuum away the excess.  It's hard to tell in the pictures, but there really is a difference in color based on the base.  Of the 3 people who looked at the samples, all three agreed that the dark paint was the better choice.  So last night, with the help of my mother (bless her for her enthusiasm on this project!), we tackled the first half of the main line...

This is how the roadbed looks when the Styrofoam has been painted, the track has been laid, and ballast has been spread over everything.  In some cases, the track kept pulling up from the paint, and I had to weight the track down to keep it firmly pressed into the paint.  In the future I will have very narrow screws at the ready to screw down any track that tried to pull up.

Here is a picture of the outer-to-inner-track crossover under ballast.  As you can see, I have taped up the switch at the mechanism to avoid getting ballast trapped in the 'throat' of the switch.  I will know soon enough if it worked.  FYI the ballast in the lower picture is still a little damp, which is why it is a darker shade.

I plan to vacuum away the excess ballast in a couple of days and will post about the results, including some better pictures.

One last picture:  Here is the end of the station area, where I have cut out the Styrofoam to sink the signal mechanisms a little,  I believe this will look much better than having the large Marklin solenoids sticking up behind the signals...

Stay tuned for the ballasting finale!!