Ballasting Track with HO-Scale Ballast

Hi, my name is Josh, welcome to my father and I's Norfolk Southern HO scale layout. And today, I'm gonna show you how to ballast track, and even though we're working in HO scale today, these same techniques are gonna work for N scale, O scale, or any other scale that you model. So what you need for this project is a paintbrush, we're gonna use this to spread the ballast. A spoon to help distribute the ballast. We're gonna need some water with one pump of soap, what this is gonna do is just decrease the surface tension and allow the glue to penetrate the ballast. We're gonna need some Elmer's Wood Glue or any type of wood glue that you have. And then some ballast. Now, as far as ballast, we use Woodland Scenics ballast. We use fine ballast for HO scale, also the same for N scale. If you're working with larger scales, such as S or O scale, I would recommend maybe trying some medium or a little bit bigger ballast. So with that being said, let's go and get started. I'm going to start by spreading the ballast. Again, I'm gonna use my spoon to just apply a little bit. Before I actually apply the ballast to the track, though, I'm gonna apply a little layer of ballast along the side of the track. Now, if there wasn't a station on the other side, I would do the same over there. And the reason I'm gonna put this out here is because sometimes railroads replace their ballast or put new ballast on top of old ballast if the old one is dirty or is washed away. And so that's what I'm trying to represent here. I'm gonna use a little bit of a darker color along the sides of the right-of-way here, and then for the track itself, I'm gonna use the color that I want. You'll see how the end result looks here in a minute. But in my opinion, it looks really good when you do it this way. So with that layer down, we're gonna go ahead and get started on the actual ballast for the track, and to do this, how I usually spread this is I get a little bit on the spoon, and then I put it right next to the track, specifically right next to the ties. I tilt it up at about a 30 to 40 degree angle, and move along the side of the ties here. So you can see, it really applies the ballast nicely, a nice and even pattern here, and then once I spread it out with a brush, which I'll do in just a minute here, you'll see that I get a nice, even, and uniform looking ballast here. All right, so I got the ballast spread out here, same technique I just showed you guys. Now we're gonna go ahead and spread it. We're gonna use the painter's brush here. The only recommendation here is that you get one with an angle. It makes it a little bit easier, and also that it's a soft bristle brush. So I always work one direction to the other with this. If you try to go multiple directions, it's a little bit harder. It's easy to spread it all in the same direction and then kind of take any excess or any extra and kind of keep pushing it down the line until you run out of space, and then you'd add more and you kind of dispense it there. So as you can see here, just using light motions, I'm gonna go back and forth. And I'm only touching the track in one direction. If I go back the other way, you'll see it'll mess it up. But if I just go in one direction, so I'm gonna go one swipe, lift off, and go back, and just very lightly repeat this motion, I kind of focus the brush on one rail, and then I'll go back and focus the brush on the other rail. And I do this because it's just a little too narrow for both rails, and the typical brush doesn't get too much wider than this, as you can see. So you can see I'm just gonna repeat this all the way down the line here, and then we'll come back and remove some of the fine cinders that are on top of the ties. And I'll show you an easy way to do that as well. And now the last thing we're gonna go ahead and do is just remove those last couple cinders from the ties on the track here. And I've tried a bunch of different techniques, and this might seem really simple, but if you guys trust me, this just works really well, and give it a shot for yourself. You'll notice I'm gonna, you know, take one finger down the middle of the track, and then I'll just get the outsides of the ties here with my other fingers. You get nearly perfect results every time. Now, with our ballast all formed and perfectly distributed here, the next thing we're gonna have to do is glue it down. So what I'm using here is just an old lens cleaner bottle. I would recommend some sort of hairspray or old lens cleaner bottle, and the reason for this is you want any sort of bottle that has a very fine and very light mist. So as you can see here, I've just got two little markers to indicate where I've sprayed. I spray about one foot sections at a time so that it doesn't evaporate. And instead of using just straight Elmer's Glue, since it's so thick, what I actually do is dilute it down to about half water and half glue. So I've got an old blue bottle here, which we use, and as you can see here, we just indicated a little halfway mark. So we fill up half of it with water, then fill up half of it with glue, and it's easier to do water first, then glue, but if it's warm water, you can kind of do it any way that you want as long as you mix it well. So that being said, we're just gonna drip it. We're gonna start off by going down the middle of the track, and you can see, once you get a nice bead going, you can just go down the track. That's where I stopped spraying. And then closer to here to the station, I'm gonna just go a little bit lighter, a little bit slower, so I don't accidentally get any glue on the platform. Well, thanks for watching. I appreciate your time. I hope this was helpful. Once again, this is how to ballast track, and a great way to learn and to take these techniques into practice is by practicing them. So what I would recommend if you haven't done this before is just maybe getting an old piece of track from your local hobby shop. You can also buy old track, any scale, on eBay for dirt cheap. So it's a great way to practice. You don't need a nice piece of track to practice on, but if you just nail that to a piece of wood or put it on some foam and then try these techniques out, it's a really great way to practice how to ballast track. It's pretty quick, It's a pretty simple step. Adds a lot of realism to your layout. So thanks for watching, I appreciate your time this afternoon, and we'll see you next time.