Woodland Scenics vs Highball

[robert3985]

I've used both WS and Highball, and WS if properly "wetted" with an atomizing spray of wet-water or alcohol won't float (usually).

The caveat is that I don't use WS ballast on anything unless a customer requests it because for N-scale, it's too coarse...like WAAAaaaay too coarse to my eye.

For myself, I use real rock ballast, and a Highball mix, with some graded sacred dirt mixed in, is perfect for my UP mainlines.

I get best results by grading the Highball Ballast also to get rid of the super-fine dust, which can turn your ballast into what appears to be grainy concrete.

For my mainlines, I first use a screen that lets anything smaller than .021" fall through...then I screen it again to allow anything smaller than .012" to fall through, which gets rid of the dust.

UP's well-maintained mainlines here in Utah have ballast rocks that are between 3.5" and 2" in "diameter", and my screening process makes my ballast mix the exact, correct size.

The only thing that you need to look out for in real-rock ballast are quartz/agate particles, which show up in close-up photos as nearly clear rocks.  That's why real limestone is preferred rather than crushed granite since real limestone won't have the translucent stones in it.

Although I have never used Arizona Rock & Minerals ballast, I understand from fellow modelers who are as picky as I am about their trackwork that it is an excellent product.

One thing to be aware of is that if you are concerned about matching a prototype's ballast (color and texture) you'll probably have to mix two, three or even four different colors of ballast together to get it right.

Contrary to many, I find both trackwork and ballasting to be great fun!

Here's my Highball Ballast mixture on the twin UP mainlines at Echo Curve, with the diverging Park City Branch using un-mixed Highball Cinders as ballast:


Here's another view of just the track and ballast at nearly the same point on my layout. Painted and weathered Railcraft Code 55 flex for the mainlines, hand-laid code 40 for the branch line:


IMHO, real-rock ballast (Highball, Arizona Rock & Mineral, etc.) is well worth the extra expense if you're combining it with Atlas or Micro Engineering code 55/40 flex.

BUT, is it worth it if you're using code 80 Atlas/Peco/whatever track?

Here's trackwork I did on my friend Nate's (Nato) layout using my Highball Ballast mix:


So, yup...properly sized and mixed real rock ballast makes painted and weathered code 80 trackwork look much much better.

[wazzou]

I've got to agree with Robert in that I have found it necessary to mix 4 different AR&M colors to get the look I'm after.  GN Basalt, NP Basalt, UP Tan and C&NW pink granite.

[nkalanaga]

The C&NW Pink also works well for GN's pink quartzite ballast, although one may want to tone it down a little if the track isn't supposed to have fresh ballast.  That's the main reason I started using AR&M, as it was the only color close to the GN's I could find.

For those looking to save money, "mortar sand" is even cheaper than art sand, and is very close to N scale.  My one and only purchase was for scenery base, and cost me a dollar for 100 pounds, about fifteen years ago.  I bought it from a masonry dealer, and they didn't have a scale small enough to weigh it, as they usually sold by the truckload.  We calculated that my box, based on the cubic volume, probably had about 85 pounds in it, and were both satisfied to call it a dollar.  The list price was $20 a ton.  I still have about half of it.  If I'd been thinking I would have used it for my MILW interchange, as the AR&M ballast there looks identical, color and size.

The main drawback is that the colors are limited.  In my case, I could get yellow-brown, the same color as local dirt here in northeast Kentucky.  You might be able to find other colors at a building supply store that sells brick and block.

Fortunately, the dirt's the same color in the part of Montana I model, and I was using sifted local dirt for the scenery, so this worked fine under it.  Unlike the local clay, the sand doesn't shrink and crack when it dries.  Then add a thin layer of sifted dirt over that, and it works fine.  Saves a lot of sifting too...