Drystone Moss: a 006 pizza - track painting

Before I think about scenery or ballast the track needed painting. Vallejo acrylics are my go-to model paints at the moment, perhaps not the best choice in this instance? I started with the sleepers, but being copperclad they needed two or in places three coats as copper doesn't seem to take paint easily. I used 70.990 Light Grey and 70.872 Chocolate Brown mixed together, I made up a mix, painted sleepers at random until the mix ran out, then made up another, each mix being slightly different thereby giving some colour variation. One good thing about a round layout is that one can rotate the board as you're working which made painting just that little bit easier.

For the rail itself a mix of 70.950 Black and 70.843 Cork Brown was used, again I tried to vary the mix as I went along. And again the job was made easy by the layout being round, for the rail outer faces I tilted the board on the table, and for the inner faces I held it vertically in my lap.

And onto the problems.

First of all there is the problem of painting the copper sleepers. Next time I might experiment with an undercoat of black car body acrylic from a rattlecan as I think it would adhere better, then once dry add a top coat using Vallejo.

Secondly my preferred method of cleaning track is to use lighter fluid on a cotton bud. This does the job, and certainly removed any excess paint from the rail head, but has also removed patches of paint from the sleepers where the cotton head overhangs the rail. So I need to look for another method, maybe trying a nail buffer as used by Jerry Clifford on his 2FS layouts. Track rubbers have no place in my house!

Next job will be forming the basic landscape, but first, a brew;

Paul.