hello my 5 yr old has been getting impatient to get started on his layout. He operates trains on my layout and does a very good, the problem is fiances all money for trains come out of one budget so i have been reluctant to invest in his own. we do HO scale.
well before we started laying track we needed to experiment with ballast. I use woodland scenic lite gray fine ballast or fine cinder well I'm out of both so i had a bucket of blast furnace slag from the summer.
so we sifted it out and the fine particles look excellent luckily before we used it i put a magnet in it and yeh the stuff has a lot of magnetic particles!!!!! not good so i think we will wait to get the good stuff.
oh about the furnace slag. we went to the local cinderblock manufacturer on sunday. they have the raw materials outside so the stuff that looked like strange coal i scooped some into a bucket brought i home it looked likea dirt coal mixture so i turned the oven on to cook any bugs out about 10 minutes the stuff was steaming and popping so i took it out so the next day i sent an email to the company to see what raw materials they used yeh thats when i found out about it being slag.
lesson learned
