Hello fellow builders,

About 3 years ago I was at a crossroads: I was etiher going to sell all my Märklin M-track and buy C or K, or I was going to stuck with that ugly looking stuff. One day a friend told me: "Why do you want to sell those classics, they wouldn't worth a dime, try to do something with them".

About 8 months ago I started to build my layout. I decided to ballast my tracks so that they would look a bit more realistic. But the ready material I could find was not matching the era of the layout. By sheer coincidence I discovered aquarium gravel was a great candidate for the job.

Observing the tracks here in Turkey I noticed that they had a lot of weed between them; that was not something you could find in Europe very often.

And as I keep building the layout and laying the tracks, I realized that M track could really be turned into something very appealing.

Here's the story of my tracks ...

In the beginning, just glue the ballast in place and weather:


Add some gravel ...


Add some sand and bushes ...


And some weed between the tracks ...


Looks good even in close-ups ...


Can get even better at eye-level ...






And one final photo ...


Well, this is far as I have come. I'm still working on the layout and I hope to finish it by May 2009.

Grüssen,

Cem.