Here's a tip to ease ballast laying:

Even older tom · Here's a tip to ease ballast laying:

Buy a length of Z gauge track (£3.50 from Gaugemaster), pin it to a bit of wood and then start laying fine ballast.

After 20 minutes, you'll be fed up, frustrated, screaming obscenities and about to commit murder.

Then return to ballasting of your OO gauge layout and you will find it an easy, pleasant experience for a time and you'll get on ever so well.

Repeat until your OO layout is finished.

(You guessed it, I'm laying ballast on Ridley USA and it's cussing

)

bando1_de

Tom,
here's a hint from an N-scaler:
apply dry ballast between the rails up to rial height. Then use a DRY stiff paintbrush which has the width of the ties. Now slowly spread the ballast along the track length with the paintbrush. Don't care for tidy and neat ballast as the first railroads didn't either. They were pressed by deadlines and their only goal was to get track down as fast as possible...

Next, stir up a mixture of 50% white glue, 50% water and a drop of dish detergent to get rid of the water tension. Also, fill a jam jar with lukewarm water to which you also add a drop of dish detergent. Got an eyedropper? Good, use it for the next steps:

Fill the eydropper with water and wet the ballast. Then fill the eydropper with the glue mixture and apply the glue inbetween the rails, again up to rail height and let it sink in. Work alternating between water and glue. Next morning your track should be perfectly ballasted.

poliss

Or you could make one of these.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_super/2747703211/

Even older tom

Thanks Erhard,

The problem I had was the fact that the ballast is soooo tiny that when I was using a dry brush, it flicked all over the place and I couldn't get it to look even a tiny bit right! I couldn't think of a controllable way to dampen it to stop it flying (e.g. a spay would blow it away) but your suggestion of using an eye dropper sounds great. I'll give it a go. Cheers.

And thanks Pol - if I had a bigger layout to do, it could be worth trying.