Newbie questions....

Mark,

That's the way to do it, but just spray on water with a drop or two of washing up liquid mixed in, then apply the PVA, diluted with an equal amount of water, using something like an eye dropper. The glue should 'flash' through the ballast because of the action of the washing up liquid. This avoids you spraying dilute PVA over all your rails, etc.

Others prefer to use matte medium as the adhesive since it doesn't dry rock hard, like the PVA does, and shouldn't transmit as much noise to the baseboard.

Once the whole lot has dried off - it takes a day or so depending on how heavy handed you've been with the water, etc. - then you can brush and vacuum off any excess ballast which hasn't stuck, and the rest will stay put no matter how the baseboard sits.

Jim.

Hi Jim thanks for the advice just one more question do you use cork under the track ? or just put ballast straight on the base board ?

Mark

Mark,

To date I've used 1/8" (3.5mm) cork sheet as a track base and the ballast is glued to that. I did try using foam board on a 7mm layout and that hasn't been a raging success - the foam board doesn't give the noise decoupling that I had hoped for and the thicknesses of different sheets can vary, requiring packing at joins.

However, on my next layout I'm going to have a go at Iain Rice's method using soft foam sheet which is covered with thin paper and the track and ballast sits on the paper leaving the track sitting on an absorbent base which should cut down noise a good bit. I think the only problem with Iain's method is that track will have to act like the prototype and give under the weight of vehicles without incurring too much long term damage. This shouldn't be a problem with RTR trackwork, but with scratchbuilt trackwork, it might be a cause for concern, especially in pointwork.

Jim.