I have never seen this suggestion made so I thought I would make it. If you have been to your favorite home improvement store recently you may have see something called Stone Textured Paint. It comes in spray cans and is in several different shades…a couple of which look like granite.
I have used this as ballast on the my layout and I have to tell you it looks great. Sprayed in several light coats and allowed to dry between each layer you can get a very naturally looking ballast affect.
Now there is a major down side to this which is probabaly why not too many people use it. Its paint. Once you have painted the track and ties, they are painted to stay. But since I am on my 6th and last layout, spraying the track down isn’t going to be an issue for me.
If you think you might be at a point where the layout you are currently constructing is going to be your last, maybe give it a try. Oh and its also great for simulating actual rock outcroppings on the side of a hill. Just be careful if you are using foam as your scenery base as this stuff will eat foam. I used a good water base earth color to seal my foam and then spray the paint on,again in light coats. Not too much. A little goes a long way.
I made posts of this exact process a few years back. I did my whole layout this way.
I went a step further though, the spray paint not only does ballast, it is what holds my track down on the foam. I sprayed the paint until it built up and then pressed the track into the wet paint, when the paint dried, it holds the track in place.
I did every rock face with this paint.
I never found this paint to eat the foam, it laytex based. the brand from walmart that i bought was at least.
I made the mistake of buying the PlastiKote brand. It needs to be sealed with a clear coat or it flakes off real easy. A few people have shown some nice photos of things they’ve used it on.
There’s also a lighter texture spray paint that dries to a semi fine sand paper texture. This works well on streets and roads.
The black and white stone texture from Krylon’s “Make It Stone” results in a very convincing tar and gravel roof with no effort except spraying it on and giving it a day to dry.
I have a stretch of mainline that is hidden by cliffs and buildings that is about 25 feet long and can’t be seen except from one angle that most viewers would never get to. I’m using Bachmann E-Z track, which is E-Z except for ballasting - it is a real pain. I used Krylon’s Granite stone color paint for the ballasting. It has just the right amount of black to make it look like decompossed granite ballast. The only downside is the paint covers the ties and sides of the track but both can easily be scraped off with a dull Xacto blade. I hate to admit it but, when properly cleaned up, it looks better than the real ballasting I did on the more visible parts of the layout.
The theatre looks nice. Kind of like stucco, which I used to see a lot when I lived in Phoenix. The stucco doors on the left end look a little strange, though.
I’ve taken a few photos of some track and tar and gravel roofs that were done with the Krylon “Stone in a Can” products I wrote about. My mainline that’s painted is covered in blue painter’s tape becaase I’m building a hill behind town but here are a few pictures of one section of track. There’s no ballasting except what came from a can.
I think they look pretty good except for my lousy camera work. [:)] After having done this, I could have saved a lot of time by first painting the whole thing a railroad tie brown and then making a mask with cardboard that would cover just the ties before I sprayed the stone paint. Cleaning the stuff off the ties and painting the ties and track isn’t hard, just tedious. It’s probably not much more work than if you had laid ballast the traditional way but a tie mask would have made it go even faster. If your track is completely in the background, I wouldn’t even go to this much trouble. Clean the rail tops and you’re good to go.
Doing tar and gravel roofs is even easier. Just get the roof parts of the kit first and find a good area to spray. Four or five lengths of newspaper in the garage floor worked for me. The trick is to shake the can just enough but not too much to achieve a gravel on top of tar look so practicing on some scrap plastic is a good idea.
In this picture, I’ve tried to recreate a thick tar and gravel coating:
I got the traffic light from a guy on e-bay. He advertises there all the time. I think it was about $10 for the pair. You’ll find it if you do a search on traffic light (or red light, as we like to call them in the South[:)]). They are four way but it was easy to shave off one side using an Xacto chisel blade. I have another four way intersection for the other light that still needs to be done. They look very convincing once you get them so they hang straight across the intersection.
Some square styrene, a drill press and some 1/16 brass tube stock you could make those real easy… Just my humble opinion… I may have to try one later today…
I think you’re right about using a drill press with the right size square styrene but you should use solid brass tube or solid styrene for the lights. You paint all the lights you want “dark” in black and the one you want “lighted” in red or green. If you use hollow tube, the whole signal will look dark. As I wrote in a previous thread, using red and green glitter nail polish really makes the light stand out.
This would be an interesting project for someone with a lot better electrical skills than me. I think the signal is too small in scale to have it all lit but I’ll bet you could make a hollow styrene signal and then have a green and red LED for the different directions. Since the light is hanging in the intersection anyway, it would just be a matter of using some shrink tubing, making the wires that come out look like the cable that runs to the light from the power source. This type of traffic light is so common in the US that I’d snap up some if they came out with lit models. Even the new Walthers lights, while they look better than the old life-Like models with the huge bulbs, still don’t match most of the traffic lights in use today unless you’re modeling a present day layout.
I’ve been searching the forums for “spray paint ballasting” and some links are no longer valid. So… Anybody have up to date pics or experiences with using FleckStone or similar texture spray paint for ballasting? If so, are you modeling in N or HO by chance? I’d like to use WS foam roadbed or generic cork and spray on the “ballast” but I’m concerned that the paint will peel if I caulk down track to the roadbed after the paint has dried. I’m not sure I want to use the paint as the track adhesive. Thanks!
