The completion of the area around the coal breaker means that 100% of the area between the tracks and the backdrop on Rainbows in the Gorge is now complete. Prior to a transition to the foreground treatments, I have to address one mundane task - ballasting the rest of the track on the viewing level of the railroad.
I did some ballasting last year on a couple of areas (Mud Run and the branch to Hazleton). It's a time-consuming process, first painting the track rails, then the ties, and then applying the ballast. I paint the sides of the rails with an acrylic rust paint, which is mostly orange with some added brown. I mix it up and put it in a plastic medicine container, and I usually paint on two coats. I don't worry too much about the tops of the rails because I go back after the paint is dry and scrape off any excess to leave clean rails. Clean rails transmit electricity much better than dirty ones. Since my layout is at eye level and I don't take many photos from the backdrop side of the layout, I'm only painting the two sides of the rail that you can see. The photo below shows the painted rails after two coats, which is a far cry from the brushed nickel from the factory.
Next comes tie painting. It probably isn't that necessary, but I like to paint the plastic ties, which without paint just look like.... plastic. The uniform color also has to go. Real ties on real railroads (unless they are concrete ties) are constantly being replaced with new ones by maintenance-of-way crews, and the new ones are very close to black with all of the creasote forced into them. As they age, they go from black to brown to tan to gray, and aren't replaced until they split or won't hold the rail in place. So, I grab a bunch of different browns and blacks and go to work, randomly painting rails on a section of the layout. I paint the tops of each tie and 3 sides of each end of the tie. Most side portions of each tie will end up being covered with ballast. The photo below shows some progress.
I have to paint about another 20-25 linear feet of ties before I can ballast. There are 124 ties on a single piece of 3-ft flex track, so 25 feet is about 1025 ties to paint. It's really tedious, but when it's done, I'll never have to paint another tie - I can see the end of the tunnel.
Paint's done. Tonight I started the ballasting, put a good bead of glue on each edge of the roadbed and slathered on the ballast. This "edge ballasting" is a good first step and will keep all of the ballast around the ties on the roadbed when I work it in between the ties (probably tomorrow). Before putting down and ballast tomorrow I will pull up all of the extra unglued ballast with the vacuum, collect it and carefully place it between the rails and the edge ballast, which is much more meticulous. I'll also be putting the fine ballast between the ties between the rails.
And here's the same section in the finished ballasting state (aside from some minor future tweaking).
After you ballast, it's always best to run copious amounts of trains over the track. The ballast materials and the glue have ways to combine to create chaos, especially near turnouts and turns. That was the case with my layout, especially the turnout at Penn Haven Junction. Some gritty ballast ended up interfering with the proper operation of the switch and the glue made the moving parts of the switch adhere to ties in ways which led to some troublesome operation. Eventually, I got just about everything right with all of my trains.
If you've been following my work on the coal breaker, you'll know that I'm in the midst of building a backdrop for Hazleton. I don't have a whole lot of room over in that corner of the layout, so I'm creating the illusion of a city from a distant viewpoint near the coal breaker and I'll add a few structures and scenic elements to make it seem bigger than the area actually is.
I found a contemporary photo of the city of Hazleton from a picture in a newspaper article and printed it out at around 400% zoom on my inkjet printer onto about 21 pieces of cardstock. Just for kicks I taped it up in rough orientation on the backdrop behind the breaker and I thought it looked pretty good. I trimmed up each piece of cardstock (each page has some white margins), and glued them together onto strips of cardstock. Here's a pic of the first two layers (of three).
The top layer is shown as a stack of cut pieces above the two joined layers. I carefully cut around each tree and building where it hit the sky. After assemblying the third letter I cut an equivalent backing of thick posterboard and glued the assembled cardstock to the posterboard with wood glue. Here's the end result laying (temporarily against the homosote backdrop. I think once I get the assembly honed (there are some seams that I need to disguise better and some areas where the roll-on Elmers glue didn't stick real well), I'll adhere it to the homosote with double-sided tape.
