Would you please tell me how you finish your yard & engine servicing areas. By this I mean from the raw plywood or foam through the finished trackwork. Tell me how you ballast your yard tracks & yard if you do so and what you use to do this. My yard is covered with cork shelf liner and has four double ended tracks in it The Track will be laid directly on the cork.Thanks
Bob D As long as you surface as many times as you dive you`ll be alive to read these posts.
i like to paint the plywood surface with latex paint in a very dark grey, (almost black) color and after airbrushing the track i apply a fine cinder ballast material. i bring the ballast almost all the way up to the rails in the engine terminal areas just about completely covering the ties and just leave the rail showing.
if you go to the fallen flags photo site, look at the track structure in the pictures and you will get a pretty good idea of what i mean. it will give you a bunch of ideas.
grizlump
How a yard looks depends a great deal on the part of the country it is in, and the era it is representing.
My yard is based upon Southern Pacific operations in the mid 1950's. SP's yards had little if any ballast visible as the dust and dirt from years of switching rendered everything a light tan color and dirt, having pumped up from the sub roadbed, had become the basic ballast and walking surface. Engine facilities still serviced steam, so the tracks in the servicing areas were almost solid black from the oil and greases that were used.
Always spray paint or roll paint the cork if you can, with a color of latex paint similar to the soil color you will use.
To model this, I use a combination of commercial manufacturers' dirt blends, along with a spot or two of grey ballast where some track repair might recently have taken place. Since switches were oiled regularly, I weather the "ballast" with some gimy black from an airbrush, on the ground around the switch points and the switch machine and tie rod. All the crossties in the yard get a light dusting of tan soil color by pastels.
to get the effect I want in the roundhouse area, I use the same soil mix, but then airbrush virtually all of it black, keeping the spray lighter in between the tracks and where it would be presumed people would walk.
Modeling tracks in this manner, or any detailed manner, takes time, careful planning and a lot of false starts. Experience is the best teacher.
On our club layout all the plywood was painted a med.gray before construction began, because of it's size all yard tracks were ballast'd with a dark gray/black ballast where as the thru mainlines are done with a light gray ballast.....