Do Railroad Sidings Use Much Ballast

Then you include extra costs for railroad retirement fela benefit packages etc and it adds up to a tidy sum to pay for a crew to install a mile of track much more than the value of the materials involved.

Do railroad sidings use much ballast. While for mainline and sidings i have used woodland scenics fine gray ballast i have yet to decide what to use on yard tracks. Ballast also holds the track in place as the trains roll over it. More vegetation on the track and between ties. And if that work is done by a railroad contractor and not the railroad itself there is no reason they d use the same ballast source as the railroad itself.

So the wuestion is now do i just use the same thickness for mainline and siding or should the siding and spurs be the same thickness which in turn would match their height. Industrial spur ballast or lack thereof is another matter entirely. Passing siding would get stone ballast but that track was rarely cleaned so the stone ballast soon was hard to distinguish from cinder ballast. In most photos i see mainline sidings are distinctly lower than the mainline while spurs in comparison to the sidings don t seem that much higher above the spus.

Weathering the sides of rail more on a siding. Having said that covered hoppers are among the cars that have gotten bigger and heavier in recent years so perhaps a food based industry would have had its siding get new rail and thus. Track ballast forms the trackbed upon which railroad ties sleepers are laid. I pretty much like how the roseburg yard appears on joe s siskiyou line layout.

Anyone maybe joe knows what did he used. The point above about lawyers and nimbys is well taken. The typical model railroad approach of using lighter ballast on the main represents some prototypes ok but definitely not all. Capturing the effect is a big part of realism too.

Maybe the main and siding looked much alike when first built as it isn t necessarily cost. A siding in rail terminology is a low speed track section distinct from a running line or through route such as a main line or branch line or spur it may connect to through track or to other sidings at either end. Sidings often have lighter rails meant for lower speed or less heavy traffic and few if any signals. As a rule sidings are at a lower level than the main in part to prevent cars from rolling from siding to main.

It also helps to know how things get the way they are. I do grasp the wisdom of almost having to use too large ballast on the main so that you can have smaller ballast on sidings and in yards. It is used to bear the load from the railroad ties to facilitate drainage of water and also to keep down vegetation that might interfere with the track structure. So again if you go with larger ballast spend some time avoiding the worst visual consequences of having it stick in defiance of gravity to the side of.

Railroad wages are very close to the highest for blue collar workers. It is packed between below and around the ties. Sooner or later i will have to deal with ballast in my yard.