28 October 2010:

It must be the season for ballast laying. With all the track laid, wired up and painted, and a successful two days operation at the GJ Expo in Oxford I just needed an opportunity to have the layout set up for a few days to allow the ballast to be laid and for the glue to dry.

I followed the method used on previous layouts, applying the ballast dry, painstakingly moving around and removing it from sleepers and flangeways, then spraying water with a couple of drops of washing up liquid through an atomiser to make everything wet, then dripping watered down glue on it. There must be a less tedious way of doing it, but this works. The only change to previous practice was using Copydex glue instead of PVA glue. I had read that using Copydex results in a more flexible, and quieter, layer of ballast, with the advantage that Copydex dries matt and transparent.

The photos show the job in progress. In the photo above you can see the white watered down glue just after application. It dries clear and matt. I expected it will take a few weeks to clean up the track and remove all obstructions from the flangeways, and a lot of glue disappeared down the holes into the point mechanisms below, needing some sorting out. It may be some time before proper operation is resumed. Once the glue was dry, the track was looking pretty good.

Well, 24 hours later, it all looked good, but as I tried to remove a stray piece of ballast from the inside of a rail, it pulled a long string of elastic glue with pieces of ballast in from between the sleepers. A light brushing with a toothbrush lifted lots of nasty elastic clumps of ballast. Attempting to remove a single piece of ballast from a flangeway or inside edge of a running rail either pulled a large clump of other ballast with it, or produced an invisible elastic string which pulled the ballast back where it came from as soon as it was released. It took several sessions to get the trackwork operating again, and the results look pretty bad, but it will be patched and reballasted, using PVA glue this time.

More of a problem was the glue that had seeped down into the point mechanisms below. Most of these were locked up solid and had to be removed, cleaned out and then reinstalled. No easy feat, since they had been Araldited to the baseboards.