Do Railroad Sidings Use Much Ballast

The mainline here is code 100.

Do railroad sidings use much ballast.

Passing siding would get stone ballast but that track was rarely cleaned so the stone ballast soon was hard to distinguish from cinder ballast. I then paint my track floquil rail brown. Here you see how i spread ballast around an atlas crossover on the mainline in utopia. When i ballast yards i don t use ballast per say.

First i nip off ties about every 5th one on each side of track to cause ties to look uneven. Then ties are stained with oak. Industrial spur ballast or lack thereof is another matter entirely. The n scale ballast looks better with the code 70 and code 55 rail on the sidings.

Track ballast forms the trackbed upon which railroad ties sleepers are laid. Anyone maybe joe knows what did he used. Many industrial sidings started with cinder ballast but over time dirt built up around the rails so if you look at most industrial. It is packed between below and around the ties.

The sidings use a darker color. Having said that covered hoppers are among the cars that have gotten bigger and heavier in recent years so perhaps a food based industry would have had its siding get new rail and thus. It also helps to know how things get the way they are. It s a pain but it makes a differance.

Then some aditional ties are stained light gray to simulate rotten ties. So the wuestion is now do i just use the same thickness for mainline and siding or should the siding and spurs be the same thickness which in turn would match their height. In most photos i see mainline sidings are distinctly lower than the mainline while spurs in comparison to the sidings don t seem that much higher above the spus. While for mainline and sidings i have used woodland scenics fine gray ballast i have yet to decide what to use on yard tracks.

Sidings often have lighter rails meant for lower speed or less heavy traffic and few if any signals. Ballast also holds the track in place as the trains roll over it. Sooner or later i will have to deal with ballast in my yard. A siding in rail terminology is a low speed track section distinct from a running line or through route such as a main line or branch line or spur it may connect to through track or to other sidings at either end.

I also change grain sizes using ho ballast on the mainline and n scale ballast on the sidings. I pretty much like how the roseburg yard appears on joe s siskiyou line layout. Maybe the main and siding looked much alike when first built as it isn t necessarily cost.