Ideas for "sunken" or poorly maintained yard track?

3 options... Rout the table out, build up everything around it, or shorten the ties.

The easiest is probably to build up the surrounding area, as its easily done with cork sheets, plywood, masonite, whatever....

You still probably want the track to be a *touch* higher than the surrounding surface, as you're going to add scenery to the otherwise flat substrate surfaces.

It's easy to just overlay ballast and raise platforms streets etc.

If you are using cork roadbed for your main lines, don't use any on these sidings. Lay them right on the table top, then do whatever you want with the surrounding scenery and ground cover. The ground cover could go right to the top of the rails (outside the gauge) if you wanted it to.

I glue down Low Loft Batting with white glue, then paint it with a cheap dark brown earth color flat latex paint...  While the paint is wet I start adding dark sifted dirt, cinders, ballast.   After about 2 days letting the latex paint dry, I drop some more dirt/cinders ground cover if it's needed and spray the whole area with diluted isopropyl alcohol in it to break the surface tension, then soak it with diluted white glue to anchor everything down.  The batting is easy to cut with scissors and follow any curves and doesn't result in a surface that is too artificially flat, but I can bring the ground right up to the top of the ties.

Thank you to all who responded.  Tom A., I had never heard of (or thought of) Low Loft Batting, but I like the idea of something that won't look too artificially flat.  I will experiment with that, and see if I can also add some green/grass/weeds to the area as well. 

The area between tracks will accumulate sediment carried by rain and melted snow.  This will over the years fill in the spaces between the ballast.  The surface will be flat with an oily gray finish.  It will hold water after a rain.

Jan

When I built my yard I wanted it to look like buried ties, typical of older yard tracks. 

My solution was to lay a sheet of Luann about as thick as my ties on the mainline tracks.    Then I just hand laid rail directly on the luann with not ties.   I just spiked the rail down directly on the luann.    The wood is soft enough it was easy to spike into and hard enough that it has held for over 25 years.   

Just get a track gauge, some rail, and spikes, and hand lay it.    The NMRA gauge even has a place for 3rd rail I think.

Doing it this way makes it very easy to scenic.    You just sprinkle the ground cover over the area,  you don't have to deal with covering ties and fitting stuff between tracks and all that.