Recycling A Railway Layout, Part 4 ‘Recycling Ballast’
A cheap ballasting solution? YES!
Well it might seem a bit funny to do this but, given that I have saved over £40 you can now see why I have done this. But this being the last of the “Recycling A Model Railway Layout” series, I thought this was a great step to include. To be completely honest it was a really easy step that has save me money, and given that I would recommend to anyone.
 A) As you might have seen in part 1 I used a chisel to remove all the ballast and filled up a large container and a couple of Pot-noodle pots with the salvaged ballast. So simply start by taking an old t-shirt and cut the front of it out. Then put some of the salvaged ballast into the fabric. |
 B) Now gather together the ends of the fabric and tie off with something like a cable-tie, you could use an elastic-band of just hold the fabric with your hand. |
 C) Then on a hard surface take hammer and beat the ballast till it feels like all the large bit of stuck together ballast have broken down. This should take about 2-3 mins per load. NOTE: you might go through a couple of bit of fabric so have a couple of bit to hand. |
 D) Now empty the contents of broken down ballast into a sieve, then sieve out as much of the smaller ballast as you can. At this point you can remove any bits that you don’t want in the final ballast mix, e.g. track pins, bits of old baseboard, broken sleeper ends etc. NOTE: There still might be large bits of stuck together ballast, just throw it back into the next load of ballast that you are going to break down. As it will probably break down next time around. |
 E) Now once you have beaten and sieved all the salvaged ballast then simply tip the ballast that fell though the sieve into one pot, and the stuff that was left in the sieve into another. As this will give you two different sizes of ballast, one fine and a normal coarse. NOTE: as much as I tried there was still a tiny amount of large stuck together ballast, this tended to be were I had use super glue on the track side of the old layout. |
 F) Now ballast your new layout! I did make a slighly different Glue/Water mix though, A ratio of 70% water to 30% PVA Glue and a few drops of washing up liquid, I used this mix compared to my normal 50/50 glue mix as the recycled ballast already has an amount of glue on it. And on a test patch that I did, it ended up having white streaks of PVA glue after it had dried on it. TIP: I found that the finer ballast that fell through the sieve work excellently between points and small track gaps! |
And the final result from a great idea
As you can see the ballast looks weathered, and because it was salvaged it came out this way so no buying more scatter so I saved even more money, but I did once I laid the filling scatter add a little more green to show a lack of weeding!
I really hope I have gave some great ideas in this series and if you want to follow the rest of this layout building please go to the Voxville End TMD pages here
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