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Well, sometimes I think the costs are a little high, but high costs sometimes help because it makes me appreciatte things more and I have learned how to manage my money better. Of everything that I've done on Model Railroading the one thing that scares me the most is BALLASTING!!! On the first board that I made ( small 4x8) and experimented with, I decided to add ballast along with green grass paper. By the time I was done with that board, I had patched that paper about 100 times, had about 10,000 staples in it, had about 5 pounds of old scrap rail from track that had gone bad because of bad ballasting, and the 2 4x4 boards had about 100 holes in them from all the hammering and tearing out. I had no idea what I was doing so I tried applying coarse ballast using my own version of scenic cement with bottles of glue mixed with alcohol and water, all I did was end up making a mess, I had glue and water everywhere!!! all over the floor and then I used WAY TOO MUCH GLUE to make it stick really good, and the rails starting popping up!! I'd say that I probably used about 30 bottles of glue and 20 gallons of water and 3 big bottles of alcohol!!! lol Then, I tried to patch it back and used fine ballast, well, the fine ballast looked better, but I applied it on top of the green grass paper, and the green coloring came up and turned my nice sandy looking ballast GREEN!!!! Then, to try and fix that I sprayed the ballast with bleach, which turned it back to a whitish color, but then the green grass paper turned white!! So, to make a wild story short, I am very nervous about ballasting. I am in the process of building a new 4x16 board, and I plan on ballasting, but I am going to go very very slow on doing it, and I am going to practice it on a separate board several times and I probably will get several books about it to learn how to properly apply it. Plus, I'm not mixing glue/water/alcohol together anymore, I'm going to buy Scenic Cement and the proper tools to apply it properly.
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