We are in the process of laying ballast on the sidings of our club's HO layout. When we laid the coarse ballast on the mainline the "wet water sprayed on followed by 50/50 glue water" worked well, the results were excellent. The finer woodland scenes ballast is giving us issues. After everything is said and done the ballast dries with a hard shell that cracks and allows loose ballast underneath to come out. It seems that the glue is not soaking all the way through. I tried thinning the glue mix more and soaking the ballast more thoroughly and neither option seems to help, does anyone have any tips or hints?
On a related note of the matt medium vs. Elmer’s, I was recently asked to re-do a module for another club, the entire job came out nicely except the ballast, I was unable to remove the old, matt medium applied ballast without destroying the track and chose to leave the old stuff in place. On the other hand, our club’s layout uses Elmer’s and the track work takes minutes to modify due to the ease of ballast removal.
mark_in_utah wrote:I've heard that matte glue is better than elmers in that is dries to a rubbery consistency, and hence quieter than elmers. My last layout was a LOT noisier once I ballasted with elmers. I'll definately be using matte glue next. For the glue mixture I used +50% alcohol, 25% water and 25% glue mixed with a few drops of detergent. It doesn't take much glue to hold everything inplace, and the diluted glue keeps big blobs of it from accumulating in one place. I'd pretty much guarantee that the plastic ties are immune to alcohol, as a LOT of people use alcohol to clean their tracks, and I have yet to hear of their rails coming up. :-) Mark in Utah
Hi Mark,
The trouble with matte medium is that if you ever want to pull up the track for whatever reason, I'm told that matte medium won't dissolve away with water because it is water-proof once dry. I therefore stick with the Elmer's/water mixture so I can simply spray water on a section being removed and the ballast will wash off the track/turnouts.
Hope this helps.
Mondo
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