Coffee Grounds/Walnut Shells for Ballast

[carpediem4570]

Greetings All:

I drink a lot of coffee.  Grind my beans.  Consequently, I have a lot of coffee grounds.

One day, I dried out the grounds and put them in a glass jar with the idea of using it for track ballast.  Has anyone ever tried this?

Oh man; I just had another idea.  Coal load for the tender.  What say you?

I look forward to your responses.

 Kind regards,
Max

[carpediem4570]

Wow, so many views and no comments…

I did some research and it says make sure your coffee grounds are dry, otherwise they will go moldy.

Something else that was suggested was ground walnut shells.  I have several five gallon pails full of ground walnut shells.  And of course, if you need a finer grind, throw them in a coffee grinder.  Anyone use walnut shells?

Kind regards,
Max

[gregeusa]

Well, this is a forum for the RailPro products, not a general discussion on scenery...

usually close to neutral in PH, so no corrosive effect.

being organic, I'd worry about it eventually decomposing.

Here's a discussion on them:;

https://forum.trains.com/t/coffee-grounds-as-a-scenery-material/274065

[LVRR1856]

I would advise not using coffee grinds based on the probability of them getting soggy from humidity and then turning moldy - yuk, then you have a mess on your hands. Walnut shells - probably a better option. But beware anything organic will eventually breakdown and decompose. Saw dust for ground cover would probably last a long time, especially if dyed/painted and glued.

[carpediem4570]

Gregeusa:

Quite right.  I should have posted this to a more appropriate forum.  Thank you.

[G8B4Life]

Don't let the number of views fool you, for some time now our forum has been getting constantly hit by bots, the spammer kind trying to register and scrapers, which I suspect at the height of the bots visiting were for the AI companies to train their AI.

Just for some quick stats, today we had to reject 5 signups that bots successfully answered the signup questions to, and at the height of the bot visits two weeks ago we had 4463 "guests" online.at once. Of the 46023 views on this topic right now I'd suggest less than 50 were made by humans, and less than half of that were by members of this group.

- Tim