Embryo G1 Garden line
Phill Dyson said:
What are you going to use for ballast Simon ?, I do intend to ballast mine at some point, but unfortunately model railway ballast doesn't come in big sacks :laugh:
A good question and one that I need to sort out.
I was going to use the chippings that flat roofers use, as suggested and used by Don Froud. However, being fussy and looking at Don's track again in detail last summer, the stones appear to me to be too "flat". Given that my line is supposedly withered arm ish, I reckon it would have been ballasted with granite and so this is what I am after. I am discounting all "model railway" ballast on the grounds of cost let alone anything else, Paul Abrams has used granite dust bought from a quarry (40 tons of it apparently!) which he sieved to get rid of dust and also stone above 3.5mm, this yielded 40% usable material apparently. You can see pictures of his (very large) line at
http://www.pauls-gaugeone.co.uk, I presume he is using various kitchen type sieves.
I am going to investigate "Grano dust" which I suspect is the same thing or very similar to what Paul bought tons of, although it apparently is not always granite. Round here everything tends to be limestone, for example I have "limestone dust" which I could use, but the colour will look wrong I think.
Cliff Barker sells granite ballast at
reasonable prices but it is too big (even for G1).
I reckon the answer lies in the building trade, of course the joke is that with careful sieving I could probably use the bits that were too big for O gauge and you lot could probably use the bits that were too small for me :lol:
What we need is a knowledgable quarry type person, but I reckon Grano dust is worth investigating. It is not expensive in the quantities that we would need it. What is immediately available is influenced by local geology I think :shock:
I would be very interested to hear anyone else's thoughts or experiences on this point.