Bridge at South Wayside

[doctorwayne]

I'm a proponent of brush painting rail and track, too: it's a good way to cut down on dust in the layout room (where do you think all those dried paint particles that didn't stick to the track go?). If you use a flat but fairly wide brush (1/2" or more), with fairly stiff bristles, it'll keep most of the paint on the rail and not need dipping into the bottle so often. The stiff bristles will help to work paint around moulded-on detail such as spikes and tieplates. Whether your layout's a table-top type or an around-the-room style, paint the back side of the rails, too: on a table-top layout, all sides are easily viewable, but on the latter type, even though you won't normally see the back side of the rails, your camera will. With a digital camera, it's easy to place the camera directly on the layout, giving you views that would otherwise be impossible to see. Many of those views could include the normally-unseen sides of the rails.

Here's a scene as viewed from the aisle:


...and the same general area, as seen by the camera when placed on the layout:


...or even farther onto the layout:


Another advantage to using a brush for this kind of work is that you can utilise small windows of time which wouldn't be sufficient to accomplish much with an airbrush, yet still leave time to properly clean it afterwards. Also, with a brush, there's no need to mask anything. Got ten minutes? Open the paint, paint for eight minutes (enough to do at least 8' of plain track), then clean the brush and wipe the rail tops in the remaining two minutes. Even a large layout will be done before you know it, and painting for only as long as you want can be very relaxing - simply quit before it becomes tedious.

Wayne