While any one of a dozen or more model railroading books tell how to landscape a layout or ballast track, many skip by the major problem with a toy train layout, namely how do you make the "third rail" (the middle rail) disappear in the mind's eye.  While it is impossible to totally eliminate it from physical view, we used a few simple techniques to greatly reduce the third rail's appearance on our layout, the Lighthouse Point Railroad, to the casual viewer. 

As you might guess from the name, our layout is set in a beach town locale.  The layout, which is 6 feet wide by 15 feet long, uses sectional track and turnouts (aka "switches"). There are two mainlines, the outer one with O-64 curved track and the inner loop with O-54 curved tracks.  All but four of the turnouts are of the # 4 angle of diversion style, providing a prototypical look and track spacing.  The remaining turnouts are O-54 which helped to align the passing siding with some of the structures we wanted to use for a combination passenger and freight station as well as a "rail fan park" area.  This 3-D drawing shows how we fit quite a bit of operations into a 90 square foot area.

All of our straight track, curved track and turnouts (aka "switches") were made by Ross Custom Switches.  The eleven uncoupling and unloading track sections were manufactured by Gargraves Trackage.

Our primary goal in ballasting the track was to provide a very realistic look without affecting electrical conductivity, introducing problems that cause derailments or creating "foreign object damage" (FOD) to the locomotives' gears from loose scenery materials.  A secondary goal was to create the look of super-elevated track on the sweeping curves, even if that was done with something along the lines of an optical illusion.  We did not paint the sides of the track rails for a more prototypical look, a scenery technique that's gained rapid acceptance in the last two to three year.  (Painting of the rail's sides with a rust colored pain was not that popular when we started working on the layout in 2007, but we'll do that on the next layout in the "forever house".)

When we installed the track, we installed Ross Roadbed pieces under each curved or straight section, turnout and uncoupling/unloading section.  The Ross Roadbed provides a pre-cut foam piece that matches each item, allowing about half of the track tie's height to disappear into recessed pockets.  Prior to installing the roadbed pieces, we sprayed the bottom of each one with Krylon's clear satin coat to control the roadbed's "foam dust".  After that dried, we turned the pieces over and spray-painted them with Rustoleum's American Accents "Stone Spray" in the grey stone color (# 7992830).  The grey stone spray paint served two purposes, first it provided a somewhat prototypical color as a "placeholder" under the track while the ballasting project was underway and second it hit the roadbed's yellow color.

When all of the roadbed was treated with the clear satin coating and the grey stone spray paint, we installed the track using the # 4 blackened screws from Gargraves.  We pre-drilled the holes in the ties using a 1/8" drill bit as suggested by Gargraves, then hid the fresh wood using a black/brown furniture finish touch up pen from the hardware store.  The blackened screws "disappear" into the background of the tie with this approach.  We slightly counter-sunk the screws, but if you get carried away with the drilling, you're guaranteed to crack the tie.  (Take our word for it; we cracked a few in this very way!)

Incidentally, the # 4 3/4" screws were long enough to penetrate the tie, roadbed and the underlying Homasote, but short enough to not enter the underlying 3/4" plywood.  This prevented the dreaded noise transfer often encountered in O-gauge railroads where the trains transmit vibrations through the track screws to the underlying plywood with a resulting "rolling thunder" sound.  The next two photos show the results once the track and roadbed were installed.

This initial approach helped us towards partially meeting our primary goal of achieving a realistic appearance.  As you'll see from the photo below, we also met our secondary goal of obtaining a super-elevated track appearance on the sweeping curves at the ends of the layout.

At this point, it was time to start several weeks of ballasting using a 50/50 water/white glue mix and the granite ballast sold by Brennan's Better Ballast.  The glue mix was laid out using a small squirter bottle from the local beauty supply store.  The ballast was applied the old fashioned way, shaken over the glue from a semi-flattened paper cup.  After a two foot by one foot area or so was completed, more glue mix was applied over the ballast. We found the power wires going to the track could be hidden by "burying" the power clips and the attached wires in a low mound of ballast.  (So long as you keep the power off until the glue dries, there's no electrical conductivity problem.)  We also learned you could easily remove the ballast if you needed to fix something.  One removal technique is to spread some warm water over the ballast.  Another method is to just tap the ballast with the rubber end of a screwdriver.  Either one will break the glued ballast without damaging the track. 

In the photo below, our granddaughter Savannah used this ballasting technique (including the paper cup shaking action!) where she helped on the inner areas of the missile rail card yard tracks.  (For those who want to skip ahead, if you go to our web page on Creating a Missile Rail Car Base, you'll see what this scene looked like when it was finished.)

As things progressed, we started thinking the results looked pretty good and met our scenery goals.  When we were finished, the look was nothing short of fantastic! 

And the third rail has almost disappeared from view!

We hope this "how to" page helps you with your track ballasting project! 

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