Do Railroad Sidings Use Much Ballast

Many industrial sidings started with cinder ballast but over time dirt built up around the rails so if you look at most industrial.

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. As a rule sidings are at a lower level than the main in part to prevent cars from rolling from siding to main. Ballast also holds the track in place as the trains roll over it. 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.

Capturing the effect is a big part of realism too. I pretty much like how the roseburg yard appears on joe s siskiyou line layout. Sidings often have lighter rails meant for lower speed or less heavy traffic and few if any signals. While for mainline and sidings i have used woodland scenics fine gray ballast i have yet to decide what to use on yard tracks.

Minimal to no ballast. Anyone maybe joe knows what did he used. Weathering the sides of rail more on a siding. 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.

So slightly lower siding which can be done with using n scale sized roadbed versus the main. 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. The point above about lawyers and nimbys is well taken. 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.

Passing siding would get stone ballast but that track was rarely cleaned so the stone ballast soon was hard to distinguish from cinder ballast. 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. The typical model railroad approach of using lighter ballast on the main represents some prototypes ok but definitely not all. Maybe the main and siding looked much alike when first built as it isn t necessarily cost.

It is packed between below and around the ties. It also helps to know how things get the way they are. 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. More vegetation on the track and between ties.

Railroad wages are very close to the highest for blue collar workers. 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.