Hello, steemians! Welcome to my page!
As a follow up to my first post about my 7-1/2 inch gauge railroad, this post is about finishing the ballasting of the track with the small pile of gravel that I had available. The other post can be read at this link.
https://steemit.com/hobbies/@amberyooper/spring-work-on-the-big-yard-railroad
This is all the ballast gravel that I had to work with to get the ballasting done as far as I could.
I ballasted the track close to the gravel pile using my flat shovel. Close to the travel pile it's not a problem, but as you get further from the pile, carrying gravel by the shovel full gets a bit tedious. I decided to get my flatcar to continue the process. This is my home made short 2 axle flatcar.
I pushed it down to the other end of the track and filled it up with ballast gravel. It's pretty easy to transport the gravel to where you want to put it this way.
I just push the car down the track to where I need to put the ballast. I scrape the gravel off the car a bit at a time to fill between the ties and then move to the next spot.
This is the result of the ballasting work. I didn't quite cover everything before I ran out of gravel, but I got most of it.
After getting all the ballast in place, I have to tamp it in to settle it and fill in any voids under the ties. That makes the track more stable. I can't get anything more done on this until I get another trailer load of gravel, and that probably won't be until some time in June. In the meantime, I want to build a couple more sections of track to make the run longer. I have the rails and ties for 1 section, so that's what I'll probably do first.
That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!