Blasted Ballast! (And some weathering too)

I have read many articles that begin with "People do not like doing ballast but it's really not that bad if...." and I'm here to tell you that they lie.  Ballasting is just not fun.  Not if you take it slow, are fussy about it, and don't want any stray stones on your track.  That is, it's no fun if you are like me.  I've just started ballasting a section of track where I know I'm done with embedding sensors and I've spent perhaps 6 hours on perhaps 7 feet.

My process is standard stuff.  I'm mixing two types of ballast stone to color match my photo reference. Once mixed I spill it gently from a cup onto the track, about a foot at a time, and shape it with a fine brush.  Next I clean my rails of any stray stones, moisten the area with wet water, add glue, add more water, dab more glue and move on.  The only good thing I can say for all this is that I like the look of the end result, not perhaps because it looks great but because it makes everything else look poor, which must mean it's doing some good.

Wet water and glue applied

The keen eye'd among you may notice that my rails are weathered as well.  This started off as the most horrible chore ever, as I was doing it by hand with a very fine brush and then sanding the rail tops with 900 grit paper.  On a layout the size of mine, this is frankly a task best left undone.

In a fit of frustration I experimented with a sharpie marker on some of the staging tracks (tracks that will not be seen once all scenery is in place) and thought that looked okay- better then nothing, but not good.  The tracks were not all shiny silver, now they were shiny black, a modest improvement.  This lead me to research paint pen options, and lo, I found the answer.  Floquil sells a 3 pack of weathering paint pens (Rust, Railroad Tie Brown and Grimy Black) for just this purpose.  Exactly what I needed!

Now, as many of you may know, I'm Canadian.  Being a Canadian my government seeks to protect me from the many dangers of the world.  As such, we're not allowed to shoot one another, or bring handguns to schools, or sell one another paints without proper labeling.  Yep.  My government seeks to protect me from poorly labeled paint.  These paint pens, fiendish things that they are, have labels that do not meet with my government's approval.  What is wrong?  Apparently the warning label on the paint is only written in English.  So obviously if I were a Francophone I'd paint my eyes and then insert these pens somewhere awkward, as my government apparently feels the Quebec population is prone to do.  In their paternal wisdom my government has banned the import of these paint pens. Seriously. Go to MicroMark and try buying one- US shipping only on just this one product.  National moratorium on running with scissors to follow.

At this point I'll just skip ahead in this narrative and say that I received many wonderful Christmas presents this year and over the holidays I managed to weather all my remaining track in two evenings.