Model Railroading > Plywood Central? Not

I put a four track staging yard on my shop workbench , and started thinking the bare plywood would be OK.
But inch by inch I got seduced into making it look a little better.
Oh, let's paint the plywood earth and vegetation colors, but leave the wiring exposed for easy maintenance.
But then I shot the track with some rusty rail rattle can paint.
Why not just ballast the closest track?
The third picture shows how the most distant tracks and the switch points are not ballasted, you can't tell from the front unless you are looking.
It just pleases my eye to see the staged trains on something resembling real track.
By the way, I went as cheap as possible on the ballast, taking a coffee can scoop of "construction sand" that I had in the wood shed and sifting it through some window screen.  Looks like dirty yard ballast to me.
After the track was done I put a shelf over the tracks to guard against dropped tools and to "temporarily" put stuff.
Next will be a clear plastic edge guard.

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Well, rtb, looks like you have done a pretty good job of laying this yard with quality track work. I’ll bet you are not going to stop here. Perhaps some backdrop buildings and a bit of ground cover or maybe a complete, solid cover so that you regain your work bench surface, especially with your layout so nearby. In my case, a plan for a small 3 track yard on an industrial spur lead to the total  destruction of a mostly completed layout and that new spur became the foundation of a completely new replacement layout.

I have a small “hidden” staging yard. It’s under a town and very out of sight, however, I have little windows in the fascia and a light so you can peer in there and see what’s going on. I collaged black and white building photos that I both took myself and downloaded from the internet and put them on a long bored that I put behind the staging tracks as an ultra simple black and white backdrop. I then ballasted and painted all of the tracks and added power polls and a yard office. (I did all of this before I built the close clearance level above it), so it was the very first portion of the layout to have power to the track or anything. It was essentially totally finished before I finished the benchwork and roadbed. I’m glad I did it. Now it represents multiply industries to a “big city” part of the layout where there is in fact no real room for many industries. I’ve never understood why people don’t scenic their staging yards.

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