I look at the number of posts of some of these guys and I wonder “What am I doing here?”
Then I view some of the best and some of the worst, but still come away with some good!
My Why don’t they question:
Why do we paint flex track ties. Why doesn’t the manufacturer use an appropriate color?
What would you consider to be an appropriate color for the crossties? From my personal observation walking along various stretches of railroad track, the color varies according to age and the amount of deterioration and effects of weather and climate, or even the type of wood from which the crossties have been cut.
Define “appropriate color.” And appropriate for where and when. Do you want your ties to have been in the ground for fifty years on SP’s Coast Line - which is where you are I do believe - or just installed yesterday on a CSX trunk through the Carolinas. I live about 500 miles east of you; ties in this area weather more with sun and less with moisture as, I am sure, ties do up in the Cascades on Northern Pacific track over Stampede Pass where they get wet and freeze in the winter time. Time and environment have a profound effect on track appearance.
Ties look different with age and locale. It would be very difficult for a manufacturer to be able to please everyone. Micro Engineering found that out when they offered (and still do) weathered flex track and people often weathered it more to suit their needs, or they just bought the non-weathered track.
EDIT: Darn, RT beat me to it!
I have seen railroad track in many places. Never have I seen coal black ties.
A light brown to grey would hit more average ties.
Manufacturers already give us some pretty outstanding track that in many cases looks even better than handlaid.
The way to truly regionalize your track and establish a track hierarchy is through color and ballast. High-speed mains have different colored ties (often many more new, dark-creosoted ties) than a siding where they may be sun-bleached or rotting.
Even those flextrack products with brown ties modeled on just don’t look as realistic as user-painted ties and rails.
Painting is a very, very easy and almost instantaneous way of vastly improving your track over anything the manufacturers could ever provide for you.
Example from my own layout… This is the most basic Code 80 N scale Atlas track and Peco switches… next to Kato Unitrack, the easiest entry-level stuff. I chose it because I move the layout a lot and take it shows, and wanted robust and damage-proof track.
Notice the color changes between the mains (with the gray ballast), the spur (cinder ballast), and the weedy siding in the back. The rails and ties were painted different colors for each track. It’s obvious which tracks serve which function.
Next time I’ll be using the finer-scale Atlas Code 55 track… and you can bet I’ll bring out the airbrush! Sometimes it’s more rewarding to do it yourself.
Picky! Picky! Picky! but do you mean locale?
You bring up a point in your response which I had considered bringing up in mine, that matter of neutrality. Manufacturers are under immense pressure to recover the cost of production and this is why they slap Union Pacific and Santa Fe on the flanks of, say, Norfolk and Western steam locomotives - although such “decaling” would be appropriate for Y6bs if one is modeling the Big Brawl Two era. How many times on this forum have you seen "The ABC Railroad never ran any FA2s or FB2s; why do the manufacturers do this? Why instead don’t they produce a . . . . " or “I sure hope that _______ (fill in the blank with your favorite manufacturer here) will produce a Phase III model!”
Manufacturers are trying to drain as much money out of the buying public as possible; this is not greed! this is survival. Economically they need to cater to as many people as possible with their offerings; it is probable that these offerings may contain some technical inaccuracies for specific and unique applications. This is why there is a thriving aftermarket enabling one to detail to a specific objective.
And I might mention that on my first couple of N Scale layouts I layed down Rail Craft/Micro Engineering weathered flex but the weathering was not what I wanted so I have used a considerable amount of unweathered flex and done my own weathering.
Thanks! Brain fart there!
Patience, Athearn has weathered cars coming, I’m sure weathered ties can’t be far behind.[:)]
Actually, it makes sense for manufacturers to make everything with the brand new look. It’s easier to add weathering to taste than it would be to remove factory applied weathering (which probably wouldn’t be practical anyway).
Enjoy
Paul
Dude…those Athearn ‘factory weathered’ cars are a joke…
To look realistic, ALL model track - whether it’s flex-track, sectional, hand laid, or pre-weathered - needs to be painted and weathered. What has been stated in other posts about the variations in tie color according to locale, age, or type of railroad is true. This effect can only be achieved by additional painting and weathering. Railcraft/Micro-Engineering as well as other brands are a good start in achieving this goal because once weathered and painted, they look better than hand laid.
[:)]Because your idea of an appropriate color isn’t somebody else’s idea of an appropriate color. It’s that simple. It’s much cheaper to manufacture the ties all one color and let the end user (you) color them.
They do make cement colored ones. Atlas used to make a more brown color on the code 100 but discontinued it when it didn’t sell well.
No argument from me, but it does take RTR to a new place. [(-D]
Enjoy
Paul
I have enjoyed painting up my ties! If the manufacturers would offer several varieties of ties, I suppose that would be useful to some of us, and I would not object by any means. But, personally, I like the revelations that this hobby has presented to me. I like noticing the different bark types on trees, how rock cuts look, how clouds look, and how ties look at various stages of weathering and disintegration. After Joe Fugate’s generous presentation on how to make track look realistic, I felt it was a challenge that I didn’t want to miss. By my own standard, I think I did okay. Besides, weathering up the ties was not the least time intensive. It was quick and fun. Start painting the mains with a neutral paint for ties, dark umber, say, and then add more white and gray until you have really old ties on sidings and spurs.
Still, though, since “RTR” is increasingly popular, maybe someone like Micro Engineering will eventually offer track weathered three or four different ways. Who knows.
Ditto to what some others have said. Frankly, I wondered the same thing when I had laid my track and was preparing to start the scenery process. With 500 feet of track to do, it seemed like a major undertaking, and my non-MRR friends wondered what the big deal was. I would just show them the difference between black out-of-the-box flex track and the weathered track and they understood. I experimented on ways to weather rail and ties simultaneously, and then forged ahead. At the end of the day, I see the track itself is just another element of the modeling process. I was happy to do it for the same reason I prefer to buy unpainted building kits over ready-built buildings for my pike. Cheers.