Painting track

For no apparent reason nothing has been accomplished on the layout lately. But yesterday I all of a sudden found myself standing in front of it, with spray cans in hand. Time to paint the track.

Since I was satisfied with track weathering tests I did earlier I proceeded along the same lines. This meant I started by spray painting everything a brownish red color (after having covered the switch point and throwbar areas with masking tape). Like this.

In the picture above I have not only painted the track, I have also cleaned the rail tops. I did that although I was not yet done with the spraying, but I though it wiser to clean one layer of paint at the time, rather than two layers later.

Today I sprayed the track with a black paint, followed by a flat varnish. here is the result, after I removed the switch point masking tape.

Then it was time to clean the rail tops again. I had earlier, by pure chance, that small pieces of MDF board could be used for this purpose. With the advantage that when eventually too dirty, you can simply clean with a few strokes of an ordinary rasp or file.

And here it is all done, more or less.

The next step will be to brush paint the switch point areas.