Friday, March 05, 2010

Mud, glorious mud

Mud ballast
This is looking better. The tea leaf ballast has been given some patch coatings of fine sawdust (leftovers from sanding a wooden floor) pressed into place and then flooded with PVA.

Once dry it is painted with Humbrol earth colour (right hand side in the photo) and the results look pretty good to me - quite a bit like the track has been laid in soft soil which has turned to mud at some point. OK, this would be time consuming to do, as well as consuming a lot of tea and sawdust, but on this small section of railway track it seems to work. A bit of research could persuade me to use a lighter earth mix if the soil in the locality was a particular colour but this is only a test track so it doesn't matter.

1 comment:

Chris Ford said...

Yes! Perfect. I'd have worried about the tea leaves. Just shows that you have to keep going.