Don't Look Back

I went out and bought some S scale train tracks and an S scale box car.  The problem with model rail road stuff is there is not a scale for 28mm miniatures.  S-Scale is 29mm, so it is close, but our 28mm miniatures have become “heroic” and are usually closer to 32mm miniatures.  This makes S scale a little small.  O scale is 39mm so it is big even for “heroic” scale miniatures.

I would choose S scale for terrain pieces that are to do things like block line of site etc.  If you want to play in and around the train pieces I would go up to O scale.  O scale is also much more common, the train store I went to had a little S scale, but they said no one made the scale anymore.

I have the above pieces and a long straight piece to weather.  The goal is to make this track look both unused and unmaintained.  I bought “Quick Track” since these make better terrain pieces, regular track would look more realistic if I mounted it and ballasted it myself.  I was looking for something I could put on the table and take it off quickly without having to worry so much about damaging it.

To make the track looked unused and unmaintained I am going to do 5ish steps.

1. Darken the ballast.
2. Put a texture paint over most of the ballast and ties.
3. Highlight the mud and remaining visible ballast.
4. Rust the tracks
5. Lay static grass on top of the mud.

I do not care if the track remains usable for model railroading, or even if the box car roles smoothly down the finished track, since this is for terrain and not to run a train on.

The darkening down was a simple step, just ran a black wash through an airbrush.  I also wanted to darken down the rails since when I put the rust power on it the brass rails will look weird under the rust.

I used Minitaire Discarded Oil wash, but Nuln Oil or Dark Wash would have worked just fine.

Finally, for tonight mudding the rails.

I started with Vallejo Thick Mud, it was good, I used it in the two shorter pieces and then I ran out…not the stuff for this size project.

So I went back to my old standby texture paint mixed with burnt umber.

I would definitely say the Thick Mud paint was better, but it would have taken me at least 3 bottles of the stuff to complete the project, where my texture paint mixture, I still had plenty left over.  I could have done something about 4 times the size of this project before I would have ran out.  In the end it doesn’t matter, I am going to wash down the whole thing with a brown wash and then do a lighter brown drybrush for a highlight.

That’s all for tonight, since the texture paint & burnt umber mixture will take 1-2 days to dry.

The lighter mud on the tracks is the Thick Mud paint.

I am going for 80 – 90% coverage, as I want it to look mostly rails travelling through grass when this is done.