Heres a few pictures from my diorama progress from last night. I had gotten the track painted and had begun ballasting. I have since finished ballasting, but didn't feel like taking more pictures yet.
Next step is to paint the top with some flat brown latex paint and begin scenery finally!!!
What this is is two pieces of Central Valley's turnout strips: their mainline strip and the branch line strip for the diverging route of this #6 Shinohara turnout. All code 70; rail was spiked to tie-strips. Cork roadbed with Woodland Scenics Coarse Dark Brown ballast, which will most certainly not be used on my layout. Medium/Coarse ballast is pretty annoying to work with in HO. If it was pulverized to be juuuust a bit smaller, that would be cool. I thought I'd bought their Medium ballast, but oh well.
The tie-strips were painted with a Floquil RR Tie Brown marker, the turnout was painted with my bottle of Floquil Rail Brown, which seems to be an old/bad bottle (my set of markers came with 2 RR Tie Browns instead of a Rail Brown). The rails were painted with a combination of the Floquil Rail Brown and the Floquil Rust marker in alternating layers. I'm pleased with these results, but I definitely don't like the tie color. The flash from the camera kind of washes out the colors a bit and makes them too bright, but you get the idea of what they look like.
That rail color looks just like my Floquil rail brown. If you can, turn your flash off when taking pictures and use another light source. I like using fine ballast in HO.
haha, yeah, its funny because I had to mix it in with the Rust paint to get that look, otherwise it would have been a weird green/brown.
the ballasting is done. i didn't feel like uploading any more pics today tho, lol