lay ballast or landscape first?

I'd at least rough in all the contours and give the ground a basic layer of paint and ground cover. I can't see any good reason to add ballast early in the process? ......DaveB

Do the landscaping and then

Do the landscaping and then when you run the landscaping up to the roadbed profile you will be able to ballast on top of any scenery that goes to far instead of trying not to get scenery into your ballast. We keep trying to get our scenery guy at the club to stop doing that as right now he runs his scenery right to the rails and sometimes on to their tops! Makes for a mess to clean up and then looks like crap unless you are modeling some weed infested branch with rails in the dirt, soon to be a hiking and biking path. Depending on your time period and rail line it will allow you to keep your ballast straighter and neater. In looking at some of the coal haulers like Virginian or Norfolk and Western they had deep clean and ruler straight ballast during the steam era and took pride in what things looked like. Seems to be a far cry from what is in evidence today.

Rob in Texas

After

The process of building scenery is fraught with danger of dumping something on the track and making a mess of it.  If your track has Delrin/slippery plastic ties, masking tape that protects track during scenery construction can easily pull paint off and ruin weathering.  If you screw up weathered track and ballast while building scenery, it can be tough to recover and restore a decent appearance.  Save all the paint and ballast for last - make it the final touch.

In addition, ballast and the final right of way contour can be dependent on the scenery base being complete beforehand.

I left space along the plywood subroadbed here for fill to be added later.  I built the fill from sand and glued it in place.

This is the same location after ground cover, paint and ballast.  Any stray dirt, static grass, and other scenery stuff was vacuumed out of the track before painting.  No matter how careful you try to be, SOMETHING will land on the track and require cleanup as the scene is developed around it.

The surrounding scenery was a necessary predecessor to the fill, and the fill was required to give the ballast someplace to sit.  By the time I got around to ballasting, I no longer had any concerns about other materials marring the ballast job as they were all glued down by then.

Ballast is Last

Dittos to all said above, and wait until you have operated the area for a long period of time.  We all come up with a little better plan. it is a lot easier to make a change without ballast. 

RE ballast after

Thanks for the tips guys. I figured it was a good idea to ask those who have ventured there before me.

I lay ballast first

I lay all my ballast first. There is a reason behind my madness If you have ever walked along tracks where the grasses come up to the edge of the ballast there is not a perfect edge of the stone, there is always some grass growing up in the edge areas. There fore I ballast everything first then lay down the turf and if some gets on the ballast edges so be it. Its a more natural look to me.

David

Ballast first here

   I realize that this is the return of an old post but I'm currently going through the ballast/scenery stage so I thought I'd toss in my 2 cents. 

It makes sense to ballast/paint after scenery if you are going after a clean, we'll maintained roadbed. Personally I like a rougher appearance and put a large amount of work into the weathering of the track, work that would be virtually impossible to accomplish after scenery. Of course I have to cover the track and take care when doing the scenery but I just can't see any other way to do it to obtain the results that please my eye.

Yes, there's going to be clean-up and further feathering of scenery into roadbed when the track is uncovered.

Bal-last here too

For all the reasons Rob Spangler mentioned.

I work sifted soil right up to the edge of the cork roadbed, then comes the static grass. I find with the use of static grass that a little bit of stray ballast "gets into the weeds," which I much prefer to having ground foam atop the ballast going "ballast first."

And if you've ever watched real ballast being dumped atop newly laid track, the toe of the ballast is never quite that straight (exception perhaps in the UK once upon a time), while grass and weeds struggle to come through it.