Well, now that things are beginning to settle down around here it's time I post the last in my series on ballasting. In this section, I'll step you through un-sticking those now well-glued turnouts (it's hard to avoid), and some final touchups that will make ho-hum model track stand out from the rest.

I got a little ahead of myself, I'm rather new to this tutorial thing, and messed up the order of things a bit. Please disregard the color of the ballast, for now.

I've been told that nail heads in a tie can ruin an otherwise great picture and look like doggie-do between the rails. So, if you don't have a large pack of wild railfanning dogs on your layout, now is a good time to remove those track nails. The glue and ballast is more than enough to hold your track in place.

I use a pair of needle nose, or small wire cutters, to remove nails. Use whatever you are comfortable with to grab the nail head and pull up the nail.

The next step will help define the ties. You're going to think I'm crazy for even suggesting this, but it's time to paint the ties. It really doesn't take very long, a few minutes really, since all we're doing is highlighting them.

Remember the coffee I had when I started this series? It was still sitting there two days later. The cover makes a very good palette. Put on a few drops of your favorite tie-weathering colors. I used a rust, grey, and off-white. I didn't use much of the rust color. I dipped a stiff brush in the grey, brushed most of it off and then quickly wiped the brush along the ties, not being fussy about the coverage. After I finished with the grey, I cleaned and dried the brush, dipped it in the white, and wiped off most of the paint. The technique I used is called dry-brushing - I just brushed the high spots and ends of the ties.

Finally, if the area you are working on hasn't seen much maintenance, there will be a lot of oil and grease on the ballast, especially around turnouts. I tried a new method in this area - black acrylic paint thinned with windshield washer fluid. The fluid works great for thinning acrylic paint for airbrushing, so I figured I'd give it a try.

I used an old contact lens cleaner bottle to mix and apply the thinned paint. Have a look at photos of real track to see how much blackening and where to put it.

So, in the end you'll have something that looks like this. Yours will likely look a whole lot better than mine.

My next posts on scenery will deal with grass and bushes. I'll use this area for those posts. You'll see how the area will change over time and how everything blends together.

Until then - happy modeling!

Scott