Track Painting

While I was more than happy with my first attempt at track building clearly it needed painting as sleepers are never copper coloured and the rail is never that shiny.

The first job though was to fill the gaps I'd had to file in the sleepers and I did this using some perfect plastic putty from Deluxe Materials which was filed smooth once it had set. The rails were then given a good clean before I tried something new; metal black.

When I built Jerusalem I painted the rails but it wasn't exactly a success. I found that the paint wouldn't stick well to the rails and tended to flake off over time. This time I decided to try using a chemical to blacken the rails instead, specifically I'm using Carr's metal black for nickel silver which I picked up from C&L Finescale along with the track. The health warnings on the bottle were almost enough to put me off using it, but I gently applied it to the rail using cotton wool buds. I was amazed just how quickly it works, but you do have to make sure the rail is very clean as I found any bits that weren’t were impervious to the chemical and stayed shiny. Once I was happy with the colouring I then applied some Carr's Electrofix to seal everything. Electrofix has a misleading name in that it doesn't actually conduct electricity, so I then buffed the railtops using a coffee stirrer which removed the electrofix and some of the blackening to give a used look to the rails. The final step was to paint the sleepers which I did using RailMatch sleeper grime.

Amazingly after all that the rails still conduct power nicely and the locomotive still moves, and I think the whole thing looks much more convincing than the ready-to-run track I was using before.