clive_t's Garden Line - The Fall and Rise of the Scampington Chipside Garden Railway

A bit more progress on the ballasting of this area today - the pointwork is now done:



It seems that ballasting points has its challenges regardless of scale!

 

Hi again, all. Well, you know that old saying about the painful lessons being the most valuable? I had some of that today, and the valuable lesson is...

A bag of cement/sand dry mix will exceed its shelf life after about 6 months if unopened - considerably less than that if it has been opened! Yes, a quick inspection of my previous attempts at ballasting showed that the cement/sand mix is just as dry and loose now as it was before I added water to it . It is particularly upsetting that I might have saved myself a bit of trouble had I spotted this on Thursday morning before ballasting the pointwork! Worse, I might have saved myself even more trouble by employing an online search to seek out the answer to the shelf life question beforehand!

So, armed with a new bag of cement and two more bags of sand, and some potting grit, I set to this morning to make up yet another batch of ballasting mortar (1 measure of cement to 1 measure of sand to 2 measures of grit). The other hard (literally) lesson I found today was not to try and mix up any more than can be laid down in 30 minutes - the sun, being quite hot today, dried out the mortar before I managed to use it all!

Anyway, here's how it looked once this first batch of the new mix had been laid:



I will leave this until tomorrow when hopefully I have a slightly more permanent ballast!