12-19-2008, 10:46 AM
With the pre-weathered rail, you need to polish off the weathering where you will solder feeds, and at rail joiners. I also have found electrical pickup to be not as good as the non- weathered rail, till you clean the railhead. If you solder a feed to every rail, you won't need to worry about cleaning the weathering off at the rail joiners. I've never found it to be too much trouble to paint the sides of rail, so I went back to using non-weathered rail. At my last visit to my lhs, I saw Floquil paint markers. There was a three pack, with roof brown (my preferred base color for railsides) weathered black and aged concrete. So I bought it to try. The tip is a chisel type tip and I found it to be pretty convieniet for painting the railsides. Here is a photo of rail with just the paint pen used. I had to make it pretty small to post it.