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Warming up cold ballast

Will Vale

Entry posted by Will Vale

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Tinted ballast comparison by Will Vale, on Flickr

 

Cold as in colour temperature. The finer ballast I'm using (as seen on the right in the above picture) is a bit too blue-grey and not buff enough, so it needs to be coloured.

 

I poured some onto a bit of MDF and set it as I had on the layout, using alcohol and Klear (stay off the floor polish!) Once that was dry I tried various colouring options:

 

 

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From left to right, MIG Ashes White, lightly then heavily applied. MIG Beach Sand, and their neutral and dark washes. Then GW Tallarn flesh acrylic drybrushed over the ballast, and MIG Gulf War Sand. The pigments were applied by mixing with fixer and flooding the surface. I think they're all too yellow, and the other colours that I have are darker rather than lighter than the current ballast.

 

My favourite, unexpectedly, was the pink drybrushed paint. I did a test section of track as seen above, using Tallarn Flesh, then Dheneb Stone (a sort of concretey colour) and finally a very light tough of pure white. It's not quite right still, but much better than before. I'm hoping that dry powders and a brown wash around the rails will finish it off.

 

Here's an extreme close-up - the conduit in the foreground is 1mm Evergreen section scored at ~3mm intervals and painted the same way as the concrete on Whitemarsh. I ran some MIG dark wash into the grooves since they weren't showing up in pictures.

 

 

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Is it me or do the sleepers look like Mars Bars? I might have to do something about that when I touch in the rails and chairs, as well as knock the stray ballast grains off.

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brightspark

I paint my sleepers and depending on the age of them I tend to try and give them a bleached look. Obviously new sleepers are almost black with creosote. But old sleepers can go almost white. Be subtle and don't paint the sleeper a uniform colour.

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Will Vale

Good advice, thanks. These have been touched in with various colours, but when drybrushing the ballast the lighter tones over those sleepers which still have a brown hue do look very chocolatey :)

 

The real sleepers on this stretch are also interesting since it's laid partially with metal Y-sleepers. I chickened out of trying to represent those, but they have quite a nice rusty tone which spreads into the ballast.

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