Painting the rails

Painting the rails really helps our trackwork look a lot closer to the prototype. Painting the rail seems somehow to lower the visual profile of the rails. Even code 100 rail that has been painted (and then ballasted), like on the first version of my Thoroughfare Gap Railroad seems to look pretty good. 

There are different products available like rail paint markers and other things that can help with this task. But I used a simple can of Rustoleum camouflage brown spray paint, which I found worked great on the last layout. This gives a nice matte dark brown.

I covered the toe of each of the switches with a little masking tape to help preserve electrical contact later. After spray painting and the tape was removed I used a little of the paint on a brush to touch up the outside edges of the stock rail. Painting the turntable pit rail was tricky. But I managed to mask off the bridge and stone walls and work my way around with the spray can. 

I dry-brushed the ties with a tan earth colour acrylic paint. This dulled down the solid colour and created some variation by bringing out the moulded texture in the ties. I'd forgotten that ballasting also weathers the ties, so I'm not sure if dry brushing the ties was an unnecessary step, but I guess it means that all the ties have received a similar treatment. 

I did think about varying the tie colour by hand painting every few ties a different shade of brown, but decided against it for now. Perhaps I'll try that out on another module sometime. 

The yard looks better already with the rails painted. 

The foreground track has been dry-brushed. The plain spray-painted tracks behind do have a flatter look to them.

An overhead view of the difference between a plain spray-painted track (top) and one that has also been dry brushed (bottom).