I know there are many suggested ways of doing ballasting. I won't go into that here - but the method that I use has one drawback. The negative is minor , relative to the positives, so I was ready to live with it. The negative is that a considerable quantity of the "gravel" is loose after a good drying period. A I thought about several ways to deal with this, my thoughts drifted to my Dirt Devil. It was given to me as a "model railroad" gift a year ago - and, I have used it extensively cleaning up debris. The collector bag cleaning is quite easy. So, I cleaned the Dirt Devil out and proceeded to go over the whole ballasted area without giving any thought to what was good and what was bad. When I finished the sweep the remaining ballast looked very good - just as I had envisioned. And, when I opened the Dirt Devil to deposit the refuse in to my ballast supply, I had a second thought. what if there was "junk" in with the ballast. So I dumped into a saucer, and there was a large supply of clean ballast ready to re-use. I had forgotten that I gave thought to other debris earlier and thoroughly swept, and cleaned the bag, before I had ballasted. My final thought on this is that the price of the Dirt Devil could be recovered just in the cost of saved ballast - if one were doing a large bit of track
Great idea! I already own a Dirt Devil with flip out crevice nozzle and replacement filters, so no extra cost there. Cleaning the debris collector is a breeze - wash out with hot water and small amount of dish soap if needed, then rinse. When the time comes I will set aside a filter for ballast use only. Thanks! Jerry
