Leone Road

Road in Whatcom County

While it has been a while since posting here (sorry!), I have been working on the 4th Subdivision and with my local NMRA division.

Continuing with scenery on the Willow Junction side of my railroad last month, I decided to tackle modeling an asphalt road, after watching a couple of instructional videos by Gerry Leone on MRVP. One of his major issues with other approaches to modeling asphalt roads was that they lacked the white aggregate that appears after the top layer of tar wears off on asphalt roads. Looking back at a photo I had taken on my last trip to the Pacific Northwest, I noticed that the dots of white aggregate definitely are a noticeable characteristic of that style of road.


The key to Leone's technique is using sandpaper as the surface of the road, painting it a gray color, dry brushing it with a lighter color, and drawing in cracks before weathering the surface. In general I followed  his techniques closely, although I found myself using slightly different materials, based on what I had on hand or easy access to.

• 100 grit sandpaper
• .030 styrene
• 3M Hi-Strength 90 contact cement
• Rustoleum Painter's Touch 2X flat gray
• Vallejo Model Air "light grey" (thinned)
• Vallejo Model Color "sky grey"
• Pigma Micron .05 permanent pen
• Pan Pastels or Bragdon Powders
• Vallejo Model Wash "dark grey" 
• Vallejo Model Air "white"

My first step was identifying the size and location of the road. I went with Leone's notion of a twenty-four foot wide road. It enters from the aisle, crossing the railroad before ending at a tee with two gravel or dirt roads paralleling the backdrop. I plan to add a small rise along this section, just in front of the backdrop to hide the right angle joint. I also planned on having a culvert under the road with a small water/boggy feature right at the aisle edge. I made paper templates for the two sections of road that would be paved, and remembering to turn them over, traced them on the back of 100 grit sandpaper. 

After cutting the sandpaper out, the next step was spraying the back of the sandpaper and the styrene sheet with contact cement. I had never used spray contact cement before, but with newspaper down and working on the back porch, I managed to accomplish that without making too much of a mess. After letting the cement dry to tacky, I carefully glued the sandpaper in place on the styrene. As I didn't have a brayer, I rolled the spray can over the sandpaper to ensure a firm grip. After letting the exposed contact cement on the styrene sheet dry a bit more, I sprayed the sandpaper with the 2X flat gray primer, still working out on the porch. I find the 2X primer and paint line to be pretty good for modeling; it covers well, without obscuring fine details. After allowing it to dry over lunch, I went up to the train attic and fired up the airbrush and spray booth to apply an uneven coat of thinned Model Air "light grey." I thinned it with about one part Vallejo airbrush thinner and two parts water. I have learned to NOT thin Vallejo with isopropyl alcohol. This airbrushed application adds a subtle bit of texture and color variety to the otherwise very regular gray from the 2X primer.

Now we have arrived at the critical step. Dry brushing the painted sandpaper surface with a lighter gray provides the visual illusion of the missing white pebbles or aggregate. I used a Vallejo "sky grey" color and a fan brush as Gerry Leone suggested. One key is to use a kind of a dabbing or stippling approach and to be random with the brushwork. Avoid following the tire pattern or any other pattern with the dry brushing. It ends up looking kind of splotchy at this point, but  that is what you want. 

After the paint had dried, I started the weathering procedure. The first step is to draw in the cracks or patches in the surface of the road with a fine-tipped permanent pen. I used a Pigma Micron .05 pen. 

I followed the coarse texture of the sandpaper to guide my lines as I drew in some cracks or patches. Then I started the weathering procedure that Leone had demonstrated using Pan Pastels, The problem was that my set of Pan Pastels are all geared towards rust and raw umber shades and tints which did not work well. I then shifted gears and applied some gray and ash colors from my Bragdon Powder collection. That helped, but it still needed some toning down of the umber. I tried adding some puddles of "dark grey" Model Wash, but fearing they would be too dark, dipped my brush into clear water and added that to the wash, thinning it in place. Figuring that this was the place to stop, I let the wash dry. An hour or so later, I masked off the stripes with blue painter's tape and dry brush or stenciled in the white stripes. 

When I cut out the road shapes with a sharp hobby knife, I left a narrow boarder along the edge, which I 

"painted" with full strength white glue and attached ballast as a gravel shoulder. 

I then started the process of building up the landforms under and around the road pieces. I glued some cork strip to the edge of the layout and along the cork track underlayment. Then I mixed up some Sculptamold and built up between the cork strips and attempted to create banks and ditches as well as inserting a painted black plastic straw as a culvert under the road. As part of the process of fitting the road surface to one of the applications of Sculptamold, I managed to spill a bit of the material onto the road surface. Wetting it down with water dissolved it, but forgetting that the surface was sandpaper, blotting it with a paper towel was a definite mistake. The paper fibers were now a part of the road surface! I later ended up applying another grey wash puddle to that area which helps to disguise the fibers somewhat. 

Before the final application of Sculptamold dried, I pressed the road surface into place. With an application of some CA at one of the corners, the road surface was a permanent part of the landscape, ready for some scenery applications around it. To eliminate the illusion of winter wonderland, I painted the white  surface with my standard earth brown color. I recently ordered some Woodland Scenics water products and I will paint the ditch bottoms with their "Water Undercoat" paint as the first step of adding a swampy area here along the culvert area. In the photo, you can see that I had started applying ballast between the tracks to prepare for the next step of adding a grade crossing.

Knowing that I had some stripwood on hand and that wooden grade crossings were appropriate for my era, I decided to scratchbuild one. I did a Google image search of "wood grade crossing" and found that the Illinois Commerce Commission has a large inventory of grade crossing photographs online. Noting that many of them are made from what appear to be ties, I cut a few pieces of stripwood matching the size of the track ties to a scale nine feet and experimented to see what might work. I also had some thinner stripwood for between the rails that is just a bit wider than the ties. I decided to use that as well; I wanted the track to work flawlessly rather than to be prototypically sincere. Then it was just a matter of cutting, staining, fitting, and finally gluing the stripwood in place with CA to build a representational wood grade crossing.