Fine vs. Medium Ballast
March 18th, 2010
With tunnel ballasting approaching, I’ve been looking at various brands and sizes of ballast. I decided to simply go with Woodland Scenics because it’s pretty readily available. But what size? Medium or Fine? I thought Fine might be a little too small, but it looks more to scale than the medium to me. The medium ballast just looks a little too bulky between the ties.
Here’s a comparison. Medium is on the left and fine on the right in each photo.
You can see the Fine has more individual pieces between the ties than the medium, which looks little to bulky between the ties to me.
So fine is the winner to me. I’ll probably use “Gray” color with maybe just a tiny tiny bit of a little darker gray in there for contrast.
I just went through the same process. I think the Woodland Scenics fine ballast looks great in N-scale; medium is definitely too big. Even though the fine is technically too big, I think it looks really good to the naked eye.
You can mix a little medium in with the fine, since ballast isn’t completely uniform.
I’ve used Fine on two layouts ow, and am about to lay it on a third. Its really about as good as it gets for n scale. I do tend to mix brands and colors – getting kcs coloration right isn’t as easy as you might think.