Fluesheet's Shelf Layout

[Fluesheet]

In the prototype, ballast has to occasionally be cleaned so that it will continue to drain effectively. In the steam era (at least in the early thirties), the A.R.E.A. recommended that this be done anywhere from every year to once every eight years. If traffic was heavy, the ballast material was of a type that broke down easily and if the cargo dropped a lot of dust while in transit (such as coal loads), the frequency was on the short end.

For example, the A.R.E.A recommended the following cleaning schedule for stone ballast (considered the best ballast material):
- In terminal at intervals of one to three years
- In heavy traffic lines at intervals of three to five years
- In light traffic lines at intervals of five to eight years

Cleaning was becoming mechanized to some degree by the late twenties, but a lot remained manual. The manual process was to use pick and shovel to pull the ballast out between the ties down to a specified depth, then shake it through a ballast fork (like a pitch fork, but with narrower openings between the tines).

All of the above is background for a single photo... Given the issues I've had with fouled ballast, I detailed two of the Preiser brothers to clean the worst spots. They are demonstrating the manual process here: