La Mirada, CA Industrial Switching Layout Progress

[Trucklover]

I just finished painting all the track. It took a long time (about 4 hours) but I got it down and I like how it turned out. I followed Lance Mindheim's blog entry for painting track, which can be found here: <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.shelflayouts.com/blog.htm">http://www.shelflayouts.com/blog.htm</a><!-- m --> (scroll down to the June 29, 2010 entry). He suggests using Floquil Roof Brown followed by a dusting of Floquil Grimy Black, so, that is exactly what I did and I am happy with the results. Cleaning the railtops was the most tedious and time consuming. I did small sections at a time because of the large amount of track, which ensured that the paint didnt completely dry to the tops of the rails.

I sorta came up with a little system to get the paint off the tops. As I have mentioned, im using Micro Engineering Code 70 Weathered rail. When its painted and you wipe the paint off the tops of the rails, you cant tell if its clean because it was pre-weathered. So I laid a small piece of papertowel down ontop of the track and took a putty knife and scrapped the paint off the railtops. After that, I took small pieces of papertowel's soaked in Paint Thinner and ran them along the railtops to remove the rest of the paint until the rail tops were smooth. Of coarse, doing small sections at a time meant overspray on sections that had already been painted/cleaned, so once everything was painted and cleaned, I re-cleaned the entire module by repeating the cleaning process. The Turnouts railtops are shinny as they should be. And as I mentioned before, I will NOT be using Weathered rail on the rest of the layout, too much of a headache when soldering and cleaning after painting


I also got the Ground Throws in place for the turnouts. One of them will have to be customized because there is not enough room for the throw to sit. Ill have to figure that one out a little later

Here are a few pictures











And this picture, you can see where i knocked over the paint thinner can and well, it ate a hole in my foam base So I will have to fill this hole before ballasting that section :oops: