Better Ballast

Following on from the previous ballasting experiments I've now tried out a better mixture of the two Woodland Scenics grey ballast products I tried before. I didn't measure out precisely but I was aiming for a mixture of 90% gray and 10% light gray. Hopefully you'll all agree that this looks much better; it's fairly dark but with some subtle variation.

One thing I still have to work on is painting the rails. While the acrylic RailMatch paint works well on the plastic sleepers it doesn't seem to work so well on the metal rails. It goes on fairly well but when I try and clean the rail top (to ensure electrical connectivity to the locomotives) it peels off the sides in chunks as well. I don't really want to have to prime the rails but I might have to unless I can find a better solution. I've picked up a bottle of RailMatch enamel sleeper grime to see if it behaves better than the acrylic version so there will be more experimentation.