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Don, I found a technique that worked very well for me and very fast and cheap. The most time consuming part was taking all the track outside (I don't have a spray booth) to help protect my health from paint fumes. This was particularly tough for me because I had already soldered large segments of sectional track together before I decided to do this! Materials: 1 can -cheap- RED auto primer spray paint. 1 can BLACK barbecue spray paint (this is just what I happened to have - it's very black! - but I imagine other flat black spray paints would work well too!) Drop cloths or other coverage to protect what's under the track. Masking tape. Suitable eye and breathing protection. Mask the critical parts of any turnouts with masking tape. Then start with the red primer. Get down to the level of the track and spray from the sides at a very shallow angle. This puts a lot of red on the side of the rails to simulate rust. Of course it also colors the ties but that's OK as we'll see shortly. You're not trying for a solid color, just a dusting. If it varies from place to place that's great! Now take the black can and spray DOWN on the tracks from a higher angle. Instead of spraying with the direction of the track, spray across the track perpendicularly. Go ahead and miss some spots where the red primer will show a bit more. What this has done is to prevent your ties from looking red: with the red and black combination the ties take on various 'almost brown' shades, depending on how much of each color you hit them with. In any case, the two paints will color the ties enough to eliminate the non-realistic plastic gloss. Remember not to put so much paint that you create puddles anywhere. The color would not be realistic and the paints might damage the plastic ties. I made no attempt to protect the rail tops from paint. I just cleaned them all later with a Bright Boy cleaning block. This was tedious. Perhaps a simple trick like lightly coating the rail heads with oil before painting would have worked better. Well, that's just my idea. I'm sure by the standards of some modelers here it's a crude approach, but I'm happy with the result. Those large spray cans can paint a lot of track VERY FAST. Stan
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