Ballasting...A ghastly process made easy.....

[Steamtrains]

Some of you may be aware that ballasting has never been one of my favorite activities....
All the fiddling with getting the loose ballast to stay in one place, and spreading it out so it looks half-way decent has never appealed to me...particularly the coaxing of little rocks with the proverbial soft brush....But a man has to do what he's gotta do, so I bit the bullet and went ahead....Since I have close to 30 feet of track to do this time around, by the time I had only done a few feet my patience started to wear thin, and I chucked the darn brush and resorted to this.....



No....You're not seeing things...I'm using my fingers to spread the ballast...!! And it's a snap...What's more....It looks better since you actually press the ballast into place...!!! Note that I use the "flat" side of the finger, not the tips. The ballast will stick to your fingertips since they're much softer than the rest of the finger.

The only stragglers are the "rocks" that get caught on the spike heads, and those I remove using a bamboo skewer..



Note also that I pre-ballast the shoulders using glue and letting them dry before applying ballast to the track. This helps to keep the track portion of the ballast in place, and you use way less ballast than if you try to "build" the shoulders using only ballast.

I also use a "square" spoon that I salvaged from some coffee can, and it's the perfect size for placing the ballast initially between the tracks. It's rather trickier to spread the ballast evenly using a "round" spoon. Once everything is in its place, I finish the job using the tried & true method for gluing the ballast in place.



I figure that going "brushless" cut the time and effort to about a third, or more, of what I used to spend doing it the "old" way....Now I'm looking forward to getting the rest of the ballasting done.....

Hope this helps some of you who also suffer from "ballastophobia"....