RGS Ballast

Sorry I'm late to the party. RGS "ballast" such as it was, was usually whatever dirt the workers had at hand when the tracks were laid. (After that, there were gravel operations along the Dolores, but it's not like they spent a lot of money on trackwork.) As such, you'd have seen wide variety of colors of "ballast", dominated by the color of the local dirt: slate gray in the Mancos shale areas, which extends into Durango, red loess soils in the Mule Shoe curve area until you drop down to Hesperus, Darker organic soils up in the mountains, alternating with the kind of tannish stuff you've got here. The local gravels, when used, tend to be light gray in overall effect.

Walking tracks around Butterfly and Trout Lake in the '60s as a kid, and in the '70s - '90s over a good portion of the roadbed, there was never much evidence of real ballast except in a few select places, like Rico or Telluride yards. Here's a pic of Burns while the wreckers were ripping out track. Weed Ballast.

http://swcenter.fortlewis.edu/SWimages/P026187.jpg

Huh???

??????????

Peter

MST thanks for the

MST

thanks for the information The ballast I was testing was actually collected from between Ophir and the Butterfly bridge.  It is soil from the old track bed and is Iron free. I ground it up to see if it would work as Ballast and I did a mock up by just laying a three foot piece of track on a three foot section of cork and poring the ballast on it. The old back drop is from 1967 woodland scenics back drop in a tube I had since before I went to Viet Nam. I wanted to see what this ballast would look like under different lights because I have collected 4 - 5 gallon buckets of the stuff.

When I used florescent light (Photos 1 & 4) it took on a yellow color and under incandescent lights (Photos 2 & 3) it was more closely to the actual color. Thanks for the color notes you mentioned but what I'm building is the area from Ridgway to Rico and most of the soil in the road is much lighter than I expected. When I get to the point where I'm building from Rico south through Dolores, Mancos, and on to Durango I'll keep your post in mind as I have never made it that far south and from all the black & white photos from when the RGS was still in operation I had no reference to what the actual ballast color looked like when it was used.

 That photo of Burns north of Rico with no ballast is great I have never been there myself and in fact the places on the RGS That I have visited had nothing left other than a vague view of the old right-o-way to see where ballast was or wasn't.

Thanks again for your input.

Dan