This track was painted with Rustoleum camouflage brown. I like how it comes out as a base color.
For tracks that aren’t supposed to look heavily maintained, I add weathering atop the base brown color, sometimes obscuring almost all of it with additional paint colors.
I wait until the paint is dry then clean with various methods. For larger areas, I drag a dull utility knife blade along the rail heads, which removes paint very quickly without damaging the rail at all. MR author Pelle Soeborg does about the same thing. Note that I don’t push the blade, so the cutting edge has no opportunity to cut into the rail. The only thing it does is remove paint.
I brush paint the sides of the rails with Neo-Lube (from Micro-Mark) which goes on nicely and leaves a flat dark gray finish. I leave about half of the ties black, and randomly paint the remaining ones brown or dark gray.
