roads

[snowey]

I'm thinking of making the roads for my layout with either WOODLAND SCENICS flex-paste, or SCALE-CRETE like in the Kalmbach book by Lou Sassi. Does anyone know if I can put some fine, gray ballast in it to make it look more realistic?[?][%-)]

[Javern]

you could...in fact I use some fine ballast on building roofs to look like the tar and gravel thats common on roofs. I know some who made roads out of fune grit sandpaper. You can get the black wet or dry sandpaper, cut to size, and glue in place. Paint some lines on it, maybe weather it a bit. Looks just lke black top.

[willy6]

For my roads to make it easier(HO scale) I used .030 styrene. Painted a light gull gray, used yellow pin stripe for center lines, white pin stripe for sidelines, ran a charcoal stick down the center of the lanes and smeared it for the "used" appearence and painted random joints with flat black paint to show the tar oozing between the cracks.

[Anonymous]

For an older "frost-heaved and bumpy" concrete parking lot on my HO layout, I used N scale ballast from Highball Products spread reasonably smooth and glued down like regular ballast. I then painted it with a white/gray/tan mixture of Acrylic Craft paint to simulate aged concrete. I drew on expansion joints and repaired cracks using a fine line sharpie black marker and weathered it with chalks to show tire tracks etc. It's a background scene on my layout and really looks good. (I think, anyhow) And it was easy and inexpensive to do.

One thing though, once dry and painted it is as hard a concrete! I had to re-do a small portion and had a heck of a time with it!

If you are interested, there are photos at the site in my signature that show the station parking lot that I did this way.