sounds more like cinders but can they get them anymore except on tourist lines?
Thanks for all the suggestions folks.
After looking at some pictures and doing a bit of reading online, I am beginning to wonder if this ballast I've described is slag.
If I'm correct, slag is a by-product of manufacturing steel. There are some locations served by CPR that make steel within a couple hundred miles' radius of where I live. So it would make sense. (I assume railroads don't import ballast from far away places.)
In the meantime I plan to take a few pictures of the ballast in question and post them on here for reference.
Ok, here are a few pics of the ballast I was talking about. I'm new to online photo storage and there is a chance I may not have uploaded the photos correctly into the forum page. There should be three pictures below:
Any thoughts on what this stuff is?
In the third picture, the width is about 4" by the way.
It's well above freezing, about 6C (about 43F) today with a bit of sun. The underpinnings of the railway are starting to show themselves again. One thing that is clear in the prototype I've been looking at, is that there is quite a wide range of ballast size. The pieces I have collected and posted pics of here, are some of the largest I could find.
Yup - looks like slag to me. I know there used to be lots of this on the mainline in Montreal where I used to live. I wonder if they used it for ballast. The ballast around here (Southern Ontario) appears for the most part to be grey limestone, and I have not seen slag here, but I have a piece that looks just like that that I picked up in Montreal back when I live there.
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Another vote for slag.
Dante
This is pretty good ballast too.
http://www.modeltrain.com/
I met these folks at the Mad City Train Show in Madison, Wis. last weekend. Very nice, honest people. Approx. 4 of the bags fill up a Woodland Scenics shaker.
Good luck.
Coarse ballast is about twice the scale size of the samples shown above. I'm trying to get some pictures of the areas ballasted in coarse vs. fine on my layout so you can compare the size.
As for the derailing issue, I actually find that it's easier to cure derailment issues if you use coarse. Simply run the point of a needle file or Xacto knife around the inside of your tracks, then vacuum up the pieces that come off. If I leave a gob of the fine ballast up next to the rails, it's often difficult to find.
Connecticut Valley Railroad A Branch of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford
"If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right." -- Henry Ford
That's definitely slag! Any thoughts on modelling the stuff in HO? Perhaps a mix of cinders and iron ore?
Dean
30 years 1:1 Canadian Pacific.....now switching in HO