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

[RobertInOntario]

Thanks... these look like all good suggestions.

I'm much better at ballasting than I was a few years ago & there's always room for lots of improvement. I like the idea of using the flat side of your finger to push the ballast in and also doing the outside edges first and doing the section between the rails last.

This fall, I hope to ballast my small 3x5 layout. My biggest worries, though, are that my locos will run much more roughly than they are now and that the layout might run into some loss-of-electrical-current problems. To get around the latter, I’m thinking of soldering the rail-joins beforehand — yet I’m not a big fan or soldering and find that to be another tedious, finicky process!

Basically, I find that I can get the pre-ballasted track to function very well — lots of current and few derailments. But even after you’ve come up with a good way of doing ballasting, ballasting often introduces a host of new problems for running your trains.

Rob