Weathering Ballast

In my last post I mentioned how I thought the ballast I laid on my test piece of track was a bit too bright and unrealistic for my tastes. That was just a result of throwing down only one type of ballast, which was one of the brighter colors available. I also know that I should've gone with a smaller size, but there's not much to do about that now. For the coloring though, there is something I wanted to try: weathering. 

I did some searching around online and found that painting the ballast with a dark wash might give me what I was looking for. To do that I just needed to mix some black acrylic paint with water to dilute it. I read that a 10 to 1 ratio of water to paint would work best, so that's what I was shooting for. Once the mixture was ready, all I had to do was grab a small brush and start painting away.

Here is a picture of the ballast after I applied the dark wash:

Ballast and track after weathering and removing the paint from the top of the rails.

While there may not be a huge difference between the before and after, it's enough for me and looks pretty good. The only other thing I did was remove the brown paint from the top of the rails. There was just something a little off about having that, so I decided it had to go.

This is pretty much it for this thing for now. I may want to paint the wood base before using it as a display piece for my Santa Fe C44-9W as soon as I get all the pieces on it. I think that will look pretty good on my desk. Now I just need to find myself a Santa Fe boxcar to go along with it.