After painting and dirt texturing, the last layer (before greenery) was the ballast. Because I'm modelling an engine servicing facility, I wanted to add some ashes around the yard. I know railroads often ballasted yard tracks with cinders as they had plenty of them. But I also wasn't sure how it would look, I didn't want the whole yard to be dominated by the dark cinders. I added cinders in front of the roundhouse tracks, and the ends of the turntable approach tracks, with some spilling over into the turntable pit. I also added some to the caboose track (foreground closest to layout edge) and the Maintenance of Way train track (rear beside the coaling tower).
The layout ballast is a mix of woodland scenic fine buff and a little fine brown ballast. I also added some buff ballast from a New Zealand scenic material company (Scenic Textures). Their buff colour dried a little too much like a light grey for my liking.
I misted wet water over the layout and glued down the ballast with scenic cement (Mod Podge and water 1:3 ratio). Because there is such a large area being ballasted in the yard and there were so many switches to be mindful of, it took me several attempts to make sure I had glued everything down.
I'm modelling a different style of ballasting on my main line, which I'll cover in a future post.
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| The ballast in place before gluing down with Mod Podge. It dries every so slightly darker. |
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| Again, ballast on the left before glueing. But this shot gives a good view of the buried team and stockyard tracks. |
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