Following on my spring cleaning and some ballast issues, I decided to fix those as well as finishing up on ballasting around the double-slip switch D2. As of now, all painted tracks have been ballasted!
Ok, I still need to finishing the center of the double slip ....
Pretty much like every year, I did a nice clean-up of the layout, the tracks, and the train room. I cleaned the tracks with the rubber and ran the Roco cleaner afterwards.
You can clearly see the difference: clean on the right and not so clean on the left with cat hair ...
While cleaning the tracks, I have to be careful not damaging the ballast. Unrelated, but it just so happens that some of the ballast didn't hold well to the vacuum. I'm not sure if it wasn't glued properly or if it got damaged through the winter because of temperature differences and UV light ...
But, at least, trains are running again!!
Slow progress, but progress ...
I've done the below in small sections over several days ...
Today, I continued on the ballast, just a small section:
A while back I experimented on adding rust weathering to the tracks with the airbrush. Here's the link to the post. Not long after I found this video on Instagram that gives an idea of track rust:
L'am96 n°455 entre en gare de Lille Flandres son terminus. Elle est en provenance de Courtrai. La rame auras desservie les gares de Mouscron, Tourcoing, Roubaix et Lille Flandres avec +3 minute à l'arrivée.
Another nice day to continue on the ballast ...
At some point, I need to do a short post about the various tools available for ballasting. Somehow, a plastic spoon and a tooth pick are still the best things for me ...
An unusually warm day today, so I finished ballasting that small section of the three curves that I started before winter:
We keep going at it!
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| The red lines mark where I stopped before the vacations 😊 |
Continuing on that section, I focused on this session on painting in rust color the side tracks for the switches. It is quite tedious, but once you know where to be careful not to paint for electric contact, it can be done rather quickly.
Once dry, I will have to clean the top rail and test to make sure I'm correct in my assumption before going around the layout 😁
Continuing on the same tracks ... 😁 I covered the critical areas of the switch points and ran the airbrush to paint the sleepers.
I then used a small brush to manually paint the sleepers in those covered areas:
I then started painted the sides of the tracks with the rust paint:
