Christopher.
I found the CE78 dated 1957 for the construction of track. http://prr.railfan.net/documents/CE78(j).pdf
Loads of good info.
Pete
I pray every day I break even, Cause I can really use the money!
I started with nothing and still have most of it left!
As a fellow P co. modeler I have found out early on that the RR had standards for everything. Here is a sample of roadway standards. http://prr.railfan.net/standards/standards.cgi?plan=9761--
Roadway, single and double track. http://prr.railfan.net/standards/standards.cgi?plan=58831--
Roadway 4 track with and without side track. http://prr.railfan.net/standards/standards.cgi?plan=61001-B
Just what you asked for. Roadway, stone ballast. http://prr.railfan.net/standards/standards.cgi?plan=70000-A
Here is a Penn/ Central standard. http://prr.railfan.net/standards/standards.cgi?plan=70003-b
Ballast stone was a 4 inch minus. Mostly 1 1/2 inch to 3 inch in size. The 4 inch course was between parallel track.
Here is just a sampling of the standards they had for everything. http://prr.railfan.net/standards/
Happy clicking.
airwolf crazy I have walked on many of the local (and not local) lines that are very old sections but unfortunately ballast was not stamped with a production date and a PRR Herald.
Heh heh--and not many modelers were taking ballast samples back then, or holding a tape measure against the ballast they did see. I would say that based on just about every railroad I know of, it would not be well advised to assume that the ballast you see today just has to be the same stuff that was there 25 years ago, much less 65 years ago, no matter how old it looks.
Sometimes old track profile charts do contain info on the ballast used so you may want to scout old profile charts from your era at railroadiana swap meets.
Actually in many ways we are better equipped to make educated assumptions about such things as type and color of ballast from bygone years than we were 30 years ago, thanks to the proliferation of Morning Sun and similar books of well reproduced color slides from the past. I stopped being a Pennsy modeler about the time Morning Sun was getting going. I do however have the late Don Ball Jr's marvelous color book on the Pennsylvania RR 1940s-1950s. It was to have been autographed by him, but he died during final production so my copy (763 out of 1850) is signed by his young daughter Whitney.
And the conclusion one draws from the clear and well produced color slides in that book is "it depends."
Clearly a great deal of the Pennsy seems to have been ballasted primarily in cinders, dark and finely ground. I have used finely sifted fireplace ash to replicate cinder ballast, darkened if need be with sprays of india ink + 90% alcohol. Shots of a GGI taken from the cab on the New York Region show cinders on the far flat edges of the roadbed, with definitely brownish rock between tracks and extending out and profiling down to the cinders, with the sizes of rock seeming to be on the smaller side , so perhaps like Woodland Scenics fine rather than their medium.
Similar pictures near the Lehigh Valley interchange in Newark show similar ballasting but the rock is bluish-gray and somewhat larger looking.
Shots of the Aero-Train at 30th St Station Philadelphia show a very fine grained ballast but the sides of the rail are almost white which is either from sanding the rails or the use of a sort of darkened gravel perhaps.
Overall the book suggests that most PRR ballast of the era was dark, and if it wasn't cinders then the ballast rock seemed on the fine side, not the big chunky rock as we sometimes saw on the C&NW when I was a boy for example. Fresh ballast seemed gray, with some brownish exceptions perhaps due to the use of local rock. I would go with something finer in size than Woodland Scenics medium, perhaps their fine sized gray or dark gray, but with cinders at the far extremes of the roadbed for reasons of cost and weed suppression.
I have mentioned Woodland Scenics here but my own preference (visual and ease of laying) for ballast is Arizona Rock and Mineral, or Highball Ballast, both of which are real crushed rock, rather than the crushed nutshells of W.S.
Dave Nelson
Gidday Christopher, just some links to similar previous threads, something to read til you get a proper answer............http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/11/t/145312.aspx
http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/11/t/142709.aspx
Cheers, the Bear.
"One difference between pessimists and optimists is that while pessimists are more often right, optimists have far more fun."