What Color is Your Ballast?

Every year my father participated in his model railroad club’s “Open House,” an all-day event where anyone can stop in to see the club’s working layout.  Occasionally, we went as a family.  I hated it. There’s just only so much “don’t touch” train-watching a kid can take.

Beware the sentence, “I’ll never, ever….”  A few weeks ago I found myself at a three-day regional conference of the National Model Railroader’s Association.  A conference includes tours of local member layouts (you get a map, drive to somebody’s home and spend an hour in their basement) and operating sessions, where you do the same as above but participate in running someone’s home layout as if it were a real railroad.  During “Ops Sessions” a dispatcher hands you instructions to “form” a train, car by car, and take it from “A” to “B” by a certain time.  There are also scratch-built (hand-made) best-in-show modeling contests along with raffles and auctions—so you can take home more of the same stuff I’m trying to get rid of.

Part of a local modelers home layout. The overhead wire system, called catenary, is scratch-built.

But oh, the clinics!  These are hour-long seminars on topics of interest to modelers.  For the rest of us, the clinic titles and descriptions are about as riveting as a three-page long physics equation.  Here’s a sampling:

• Modeling Oversized Loads
• Tack Boards, Route Boards and Placards
• Concrete Viaducts of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad (Note: Modelers argue about the color of concrete.)
• The Case for Car Float Staging

During one session I attended, the presenter asked, “What color is your ballast?”  Ballast is the gravel layer that forms the track bed for the ties and rails.  His point?  Layout ballast shouldn’t all be the same color because it isn’t in real life. The next time you’re on a train, you’ll look on the ground and realize—he’s right. Like the presenter, some modelers are on an endless mission to create prototype layouts that are exactingly realistic. 

I’m a dabbler; not a diver.  I have many interests, to the point where I often find myself struggling to decide which ones to pursue. That’s why I know I won’t become a model railroader, although I have ample supplies on hand should I change my mind. But I get it.  If you’ve got a passion for model railroading, it will be a source of endless fascination.  The hobby is interesting, engaging and multi-faceted; it activates the creative mind, requires the continuous acquisition of new knowledge and skills and provides a social circle of comrades who love wearing striped railroad engineer caps adorned with buttons and patches.  To those who love them: Be thankful they’re not into anything worse.