There's not much of a difference between the ballast. I use two different types--light gray from WS for the main and darker gray (also from WS) for the sidings and yard. Having a uniform color of most anything is not only unnatural, but boring.
Mixing up dark and light green bushes, trees, etc. right near each other is very eye catching. It's quite boring seeing the same colors on a layout. The mix blends of ground foam are great and you can also do that for ballast.
OK guys I got you and won't worry about it. Next time I start running low on ballast though I will plan my transition points ahead of time
Huntington Junction - Freelance based on the B&O and C&O in coal country before the merger... doing it my way. Now working on phase 3. - Walt
For photos and more: http://www.wkhobbies.com/model-railroad/
Rock weathers too. It's very common to se a lighter or darker zone where newer ballastv was placed over older ballast where track was lifted. Not everything in nature is uniform.
Differing shades and sizes of ballast is very much prototypical. Quarries move through differing strata of rock generating differences in shades and color. Ballast coming from differing locations may screen slighltly different cuts for loading with size changes even when the same size is specified such as 2 inch ballast.
Every ballast company dose this, including WS which I use. You can either blend or like in my case, the yards used the different stuff, each yard different as there were three different colors in my stuff!
I used Scneic Express dark gray for my main track. When the original batch ran out, I got some more that was a somewhat different color.
The transition occurs under the left truck on the car. With these batches, the change isn't very noticeable, but I'm using it to illustrate I didn't do anything special at the boundary. I just figured one color left off and the other began due to a slight change in materials. I've seen this effect on the prototype often enough.
Rob Spangler
I purposely used two different colours of ballast (Woodland Scenics) to differentiate between the ownership of the tracks of two different railways, even though they're financially affiliated:
On the upper level, I'm using real limestone ballast, given to me by a good friend in Ohio:
However, my supply of it is running low, and it appears that Ontario limestone is not the same colour - I'm sifting my own from a couple of bags of "screenings", so there'll be another colour change somewhere along this line, too, even though it's all the same railroad.
Wayne
What Selector said, its perfectly normal for the prototype to have different color ballasts, based on which quarry it came from, no reason for you to be concerned.
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=558884&nseq=21
"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."-Albert Einstein
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You could apply a black wash. Set up a test area and try several different mixes of black wash, varying the strength until you have a close match.
I use a mixture of acrylic paint/water to vary the level of darkness.
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http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/11/t/221929.aspx
Here is my link to a process I used to avoid this problem and save money by making my own ballast from products available at Michaels and Home Depot.
I am not surprised that it isn't a perfect match, but the pictures don't show just how much different it is. Since I am in mid construction I have six sections of track where the current ballast ends in the center of the run and three of the tracks are next to each other. I would think that in the real world a change in the ballast would happen when new track was put down, or when an old section was re-ballasted. But not all over the place.
Thinking of ordering a jug of the dark ballast and trying some "custom blending" to see if I can get the color closer in order to finish up those existing sections and make the transitions more logical.
Has anyone run into this before, especially with the Scenic Express ballast?
As much as my advice and experience are worth...may I suggest doing what they do in the real world? Overlay, or start with new ballast where the old supply left off. If you like you can blend some of it at the transition, but eventually every quarry runs out. The big boys move to to a new one, or find another supplier that can meet their specs, and the next ballast cars come laden with the new stuff.
It's perfectly okay, and it's quite realistic.
I just bought a 1/2 gallon jug of scenic express #40 blended ballast and the color does not come close to matching what I got from them three years ago. It is much lighter. To be honest what I got the first time was a bit darker than I wanted but I went with it. Both labels say the same thing, #40 blended. If you look at the pics you can see that the new ballast has a bunch of light gray in it. The old ballast is mostly medium gray with darker rock mixed in.
No problems using different color ballasts on the layout, but I would want logical breaks. Not just big color changes in the middle of mainline tracks all over the place. So I need to be able to match at least some of the original ballast. All I have left is enough for a few feet of track.
To those using Scenic Express, what do I have here and how do I match the old ballast that is already down?
(I paint my rails by hand after ballasting and the pics are all new work so rails are not yet painted)
New blended ballast:
Original blended ballast: