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[quote user="BRAKIE"] Guys,As I mention many times I simply WILL NOT design a "YARDLESS" layout.Why? Real railroads needs yards and so do we IF we are to operate our layout versus running endless loops. The best part is the yard doesn't need to be 100%  ballast..In other words ballast your yard sparingly like the prototype.You see far to many  model yards look fake when compared to the prototype yard of equal size.Ease up on ballast and add more ground,weeds etc.. [/quote] Absolutely agree. I don't recall ever seeing a fully, neatly ballasted yard (maybe when they're brand new, but never saw one of those). Quite the opposite (particularly for steam era like I model). Half the time ballast is truly sparse. The other one that looks "wrong" to me is yards laid on cork roadbed. Real yards in my experience are rather flat with drainage addressed mostly around the edges, and internal drainage being more of a swale between tracks than nice, clearly defined, well-raised roadbed. My yard is laid directly on the foam base (painted earth brown first). To make "drainage" I literally just use my finger to "dimple" the foam and make "trenches" between the tracks. Around the edge of the yard, I might carve a little down into the foam to make full on drainage ditches. Then I use ground cover and ballast _sparingly_.  Since I model the steam era, I then give everything a good dusting of engine black (i.e. airbrush from a foot or two away set on wide spray, make sure you brightboy the railheads right afterward). Looks very good to me and definitely doesn't take hours of ballasting like the OP mentions. Next up is my loco service facility, and looking at old pictures of those... I'm hard pressed to find much ballast at all. Looks mostly like greasy, oily dirt with a lot of coal dust on it... Or maybe the ballast is just so filthy with so much junk between it that it just looks like a flat surface? In either case, I haven't quite decided how to handle it, but it surely won't be mainline-grade roadbed and ballasting! (Suggestions on that count welcome).
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