As the good weather is finally upon us, work on the layout has slowed to a crawl. However I have been doing some trackwork lately and thought that I would give a brief description on my trackwork. I use the familiar cork roadbed and Atlas code 100 track. Turnouts are by Peco. Once I have the trackwork in place, I airbrush the track with a 50-50 mixture of Floquil railbrown and roof brown paint. Lately I have been using Highball cinder ballast along the very edge of the roadbed and then I use Woodland Scenics greyblend on the rest of the track. Ballast that has gotten into the web of the rail or on the ties is removed with a small dental pick. Note this is monotonous but the effort is worth it. This is all glued down by first wetting the ballast with 70% alcohol and then using Woodland Scenics scenic cement. I use eyedroppers to apply both, as you have to go slow so as not to disturb the ballast. After it dries, I remove any pieces of ballast that have gotten onto to the rails or ties. Have a look at this posts photo for a look at the finished trackwork. Till next time....
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3 comments:
Very nice! Rather than eyedroppers, which can be slow and tedious, I use small plastic bottles with short spouts on them. One fill-up of either alcohol or glue lasts a long time and the flow is easily controlled. They came from hair coloring kits.
Scott
Hello Dad.
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Painting track and ballasting can be tedious, but definitely worth the effort. Cleaning up stray ballast bits seems inevitable no matter how careful you are. Recently I used various paints, from black to roof brown, the gray-brown to individually paint each tie. Now that was tedious, but relatively easy to do, just time consuming. Stepping back, the results look great. Maybe not something for the whole layout, but neat for the track near the edge. Anyway, good work and nice to see the updates.
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