Ballast your track better
George Dent has been testing a new ballast glue from Geoscenics – and he’s impressed!
Hands up anyone who looks forward to ballasting their track? It’s not something I usually enjoy, but it does have a therapeutic quality, which is something other modellers frequently tell me. Certainly, if undertaken in short shifts, it can be fun – particularly when everything goes to plan and there’s an interesting programme on the radio. But the diluting of PVA adhesive can be a pain and, if the glue then disturbs your neatly arranged scatter material, then the task can soon descend into a sticky mess. That radio show suddenly becomes irritating, and you wish you’d spent your time doing something else.
Wetting the freshly arranged ballast with water and surgical spirit, prior to the application of the glue, helps enormously. This can be done with an airbrush or plant mister, and this simple step reduces the friction on the surface of the stone chippings, allowing the thinned glue to penetrate the material more effectively. But that does add more time and effort into the equation.
So imagine my elation when ready-to-use ballasting glues began to appear a few years ago. The latest of which is this new glue from Geoscenics, supplied in a 500ml plastic bottle with a handy nozzle cover to keep the contents fresh after breaking the seal. The glue is white and has a thin viscosity, although not as thin as I’d anticipated. There’s very little odour, save for the feint whiff of traditional PVA. After a thorough shake, I tried applying the glue direct onto a variety of real stone ballast chippings (also from the Geoscenics range) and, to my surprise, the glue penetrated the material almost instantly, without disturbance. There was no need to mist the ballast beforehand with water and/or surgical spirit – the glue worked perfectly on its own. Working from the bottle did prove a little tricky, though. But with the glue decanted into a syringe, pipette or eye-dropper, the flow could be controlled more readily and the job proved even easier. Hoorah!
Geoscenics has formulated this adhesive specifically for use with stone ballasts and other similar scatter materials such as coal, so the glue is not only ideal for track work but also for creating authentic wagon loads or other scenic applications. Incidentally, I also tried it as a base for applying grass scatter and it was OK, but lacked the rapid ‘tacking’ of other proprietary adhesives for this purpose, so I’ll be sticking to using it for its primary purpose.
In terms of coverage, it’s always hard to quantify, as much depends on the depth, type and size of ballast involved. However, for my one metre-long ‘O’ gauge diorama, employing a mix of ‘OO’ and ‘N’ gauge limestone ballast, I used less than a quarter of the 500ml bottle. On this evidence, Geoscenics’ glue offers good value, especially when considering the level of performance and convenience. And, for a limited time, you can save a few bob with our exclusive reader offer (see panel, right).
To conclude, this new glue is definitely worth trying. It could revolutionise how you ballast your track and fill your coal bunkers, taking away much of the drudgery of a vital scenic task. Indeed, I will now try it on a steam locomotive’s coal load. Watch this space…