Do Railroad Sidings Use Much Ballast

It is used to bear the load from the railroad ties to facilitate drainage of water and also to keep down vegetation that might interfere with the track structure.

Do railroad sidings use much ballast.

Ballast also holds the track in place as the trains roll over it. Anyone maybe joe knows what did he used. The point above about lawyers and nimbys is well taken. More vegetation on the track and between ties.

As a rule sidings are at a lower level than the main in part to prevent cars from rolling from siding to main. 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. Many industrial sidings started with cinder ballast but over time dirt built up around the rails so if you look at most industrial. Track ballast forms the trackbed upon which railroad ties sleepers are laid.

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. Passing siding would get stone ballast but that track was rarely cleaned so the stone ballast soon was hard to distinguish from cinder ballast. 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. I pretty much like how the roseburg yard appears on joe s siskiyou line layout.

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. Capturing the effect is a big part of realism too. The typical model railroad approach of using lighter ballast on the main represents some prototypes ok but definitely not all. It also helps to know how things get the way they are.

Weathering the sides of rail more on a siding. 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. Industrial spur ballast or lack thereof is another matter entirely. 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.

Sooner or later i will have to deal with ballast in my yard. Maybe the main and siding looked much alike when first built as it isn t necessarily cost. Sidings often have lighter rails meant for lower speed or less heavy traffic and few if any signals. Railroad wages are very close to the highest for blue collar workers.

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. So slightly lower siding which can be done with using n scale sized roadbed versus the main. Minimal to no ballast.