On Track

And by 'On Track' I don't mean everything is going as expected. I mean on the subject of track, like On War by von Clausewitz or perhaps 'The Art of Track' like The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Literary references aside, I've had three some interesting experiences with my Hanley Spur HO scale track recently. 

Fellow blogger Chris Mears has been laboriously but languorously toiling on some track work lately and posting the results. Unlike me, Chris builds from the ground up. I just screw down track on plywood and maybe there's some pre-existing scenic material there for some texture, and maybe there's none. The top photo shows one section of track I might as well call the Mears Track or even Mears Tribute Track because it exhibits some shading that reminds me of Chris' much better work. I brushed some various colours on various ties and I like the look of it. For most of my spur, I want weathered track. That means painting the sides of the rails and having weathered-looking ties. I generally keep vegetation off the track so the locomotives don't ingest it.

There's one spur that is now directly in front of a small sliding workbench I've installed and it's a well-lit spot. The spur serves Canadian Dredge & Dock, Shell Oil, Anglin's lumber yard and I Cohen Steel. Not all four industries have cars at once, because if they did, they might as well stay coupled. In HO terms, it's one piece of flextrack and another short section - around 40 inches. (Unfortunately, I'm too impetuous and never sure of the outcome, so I often don't take 'before' pictures of the project. These are all the 'after' photos!) Overview of the spur here:

There was some old scenic material there from my previous Manitoba iteration - buff-coloured ballast. It didn't look Kingston-ish and I decided to do something. So, I took a strip of The Moss Collection MossyMat Peel 'N Stick and removed the backing paper. (I found this material handy during my Vermont iteration to give a quick, green hillside in Rutland. In that case, I left the backing on and scotch-taped it to the blue-painted drywall. Done!) Below - peeling and sticking is over, and you can see the moss covering the edge of the fascia and the sliding workbench below the grey fascia:

Anyway, the MossyMat really sticks and it now covers the edge of the fascia. I trimmed it to leave a couple of scale feet for ballasted track. Then I decided to cover up that buff-with some diluted brown craft paint. I liked the look. I also painted the rail-sides. So now this four-spot spur is a bit more Mears-like i.e. realistic. Upgraded track at right, with short remaining section at left and the CD&D freight dock. It's pretty invisible and might get more attention from me later:

Looking down the spur from the other end, with the water bottle resting on my workbench and the gondola of scrap, UP boxcar then CN boxcar in distance spotted at CD&D. The process of track-level photography gives me some apprehension, but the finished product points out things that my eye doesn't catch! You might think of it as The Fallowfield Effect.

Another up-close shot of the Anglin's platform (below). I added some vegetation behind the upgraded track to get rid of the 'line' separating the ballast from the platform:

Due to my gnat-like attention span, I can do a short section of track and then operate a train. I'm unlikely to ever spend 16 hours painting every inch of track on the layout!