Jon Radder said:
Function - not necessarily (depending on roadbed); Aesthetics - Definitely YES.
Interesting thread! Jon has succinctly summed it up.
I don’t care about aesthetics, but I do care about functionality. Wherever I want maximum stability, I dig bricks into the soil, level them up and screw the track into each brick at one or two points. This works for me because:
- I have bricks to burn.
- Frost is not a factor in Perth (it never drops to freezing here).
- Our soil is an easy-to-dig sand/clay mix.
It’s a lot easier to put the stuff most of you are using for ballast INTO your garden than it is to get it OUT. Years ago, I got a contactor to deliver a load of blue metal at the house for a concreting job. Later, after it looked like all the blue metal had been used up, I decided to lay a slab path across the spot where it had been dumped. Guess what? There was still a swag of the stuff in the sand!
Getting a level screed through what remained of the blue metal was a nuisance. I had to do a fair bit of unanticipated excavate and fill.
As Fred points out, the cost of this stuff is in the cartage. If I wanted ballast, I’d buy it by the truckload, and I’d be watching like a hawk to ensure the contractor dropped it EXACTLY where I wanted to store it. Then I’d use a method along the lines of what Bob’s described to ensure the ballast was contained where I wanted it.