Adventures in SBR land

 

One day, maybe soon, I want to get my garden railway up and running. The track has been clamped together, and the next stage is to ballast. 

But, we have been there before, and it took a lot of messing around to keep things tidy. So much so that the line fell into disuse. 

So, it's time for a new plan. Out goes the pea gravel. It's too large anyway. In comes potting grit. 

The advantages of the smaller, less regular stones, is that they should lock together better, and stay put. 

However, there are plants overhanging the line, and cleaning up their mess is another challenge. You can't brush leaves and laburnum blossoms away without removing the ballast. 

In the smaller scales, we glue ballast down with a 50:50 mix of PVA and water. Outdoors, the PVA would be attacked by frost, so the recommended way to fix stones is with Styrene Butadiene Rubber (SBR). It's basically a PVA alternative where greater weatherproofing is required. 

Anyway, I was in Wickes, buying some plumbing stuff, when I spotted a big bottle of the stuff on the shelf. Filled with a spirit of experimentation, I bought it. A couple of weeks later, I filled the bottom of an ice cream tub with grit, and poured some on. 

Left for four days on the garden table, it's set pretty solid. I can turn it upside down, and nothing comes out. The cardboard tub doesn't flex any more. I'm pleased with the results so far. Now I just need to find time to ballast the track around the tunnel mouth, the one place where is really mustn't move, and see how I go, and how far 5 litres goes.