Love your ballast spreader. Using alcohol instead of water will greatly reduce your 30 hour drying time. Thank you Daryl. Love your work. My wife and I end our Sunday evenings with your weekly update.
Hi Daryl, thanks for the tidbit on loose ballast sitting in the center of concrete ties. I have to ballast a few pieces of concrete tie track this week and probably would have been trying to keep it clean like the wood ties. I checked the area I am modeling on Google maps and it has the same look, a small bit of ballast in the center. Nice work!
Spraying with water is to help with the capillary action of the diluted white glue...though it appears that now the medium of choice is IPA(isopropyl alcohol) vs the old school method of adding dish soap to water.
For some reason AOL usually gets rid of any comments I make but here I go. I always will find out where the tunnel will be and I will ballast these areas first so the entrance to the tunnel will be ballasted and this is so much easier. I also use the school white glue and never have had any problems with the slight shine...I love the fact that it is water soluable in case I want to change any track. I like your ballasted track. If I had any problems with the track it would be that I feel that this kind of track is just to high. I have lived in Laramie and have seen a lot of track and the base seems to be more shallow than I see here.
I'm not modelling around Laramie. This is in the Echo and Weber canyons. The height of the track is appropriate for these areas. I am not using the higher roadbed for the Wyoming areas of the layout.
Great looking work as it moves along further! Followed your N Scale layout as well. Now all you need to finish up everything is a good weathering guy like myself to realistically weather up the rolling stock!
Looks great Daryl, what a difference ballast makes too. It turned out really good, glad I'm not the only one who uses my fingernails to knockdown ballast! 😆- Steve
Excellent job on the ballasting, Daryl. I think I may have to get a ballasting tool since it looks so easy use. When you add the static grass, are you planning on adding some in the ballast to make it look like the ballast has been there a bit (more natural), or are you going to keep the ballast baren/clean of plants or weeds?
From what i can see from pictures, the UP keeps weeds down to a minimum withing 15 feet of the track. I'll have to take some more pictures this summer when I'm out there to see for sure.
I have a similar unit, another company makes a brush unit that you run after the spreader to remove most of the ballast off the ties, but looks like no longer made. It appears they added a brush to their spreader, Golden Valley Hobbies a UK company. Tapping the rails can also move ballast off the ties and rails.
Daryl, the ballast really brought it to life, so to speak, now everything you add is going to be icing on the cake so to speak. I enjoyed seeing the 2442 trailing in the consist of the mixed manifest. I shot the 2422 in Kansas City, KS in 2009 in very fresh paint.
Hi,daryl!enjoyed your ,,midnight show,, as usual.,you might as well have twice weekly.great going with that ballasf dispenser! As im doing more or less the same scenes but of course in ,,n,, scale i was wondering about that extra tunnel on the high line youve included, on my ,,train hopping,, and ,,big boy animation,, videos i notice theres a tunnel on the low line between curvo and wahsatch.,not referring to the abandoned bore.maybe you could give us some info on these ?? Much obliged.
I kind of swapped that around due to it simply working out better in the space and for viewing layout. The tunnel on the original mainline hides a sharp 36" curve. All other curves on the layout are 42" to 60"
IMO. I have always looked forward to ballisting, as it makes the track look like a railroad, & looks complete. That machine looks like it does a good job, too.The prototype, always looks fairly "manacured" but as long as it looks good, overall, it will be fine. Nobody is ever going to look over your empire, & say that piece of ballist, just there, dosnt look right. As long as the OVERALL effect is right, Your ballisting does look right. I picked up a few tips, as I will soon be "in that boat", & honesyly. I cant wait. Thanks Daryl. Michael NZ
Thanks. I too always look forward to the final impact of the track being ballasted. It's just doing the actual ballasting that I did not enjoy. HO is much easier than N scale. So, not so bad this time around.
It really is a game changer! Awesome effect. I was wondering why it is the last part of doing the track - That is how it is done in real life, ballast is laid over scenery.
You definitely don't want any of the scenery on the ballast. However, you can put asking tape over the ballast if you need to do any more scenery work. I plan to do that when i add static grass.
Actually, I removed them before I started ballasting. I went through all the track to make sure everything was aligned perfectly and then glued with CA each place where a nail was. Nail holes are completely invisible.
