The Straco Layout - Part 10, Paving the Pegboard Paradise

Outlining the road with painter's tape.

 In Part 9, I described the buildings I picked up that seemed to be a good match for the Straco layout. But of course, one can't just slap structures down on a layout without some type of landscaping!

Although the scale of these Japanese trains is HO, this is by no means an HO-scale layout. The spirit of this project is more in line with that of tinplate train layouts -- that is, these are toys rather than scale models, and so the setting should be more toy-like than realistic.

The end result. I decided not to paint underneath
the track. Can you tell?

In this case, it meant all I had to do was just lay down a road for the houses to be grouped around, and I was done. Using painter's tape, I played around with some different configurations before choosing the one in the photos. One nice thing about using a pegboard -- it was easy to keep things lined up. I just used the holes as guides for the tape.

My initial idea was to paint the road underneath the places where it crosses the tracks. Building a graded crossing was out of the question. The rails are unusually high because the gear mechanism of the engine hangs pretty low (as I discovered early on in the process). I couldn't fill in the space between the rails to make a crossing. My second thought was to then just continue the road underneath the tracks.

But to do that, I would have had to take up the entire loop, and quite frankly, that seemed to be a bit much. So I just painted as close to the ties as possible, and I'm happy with the result.

For paint, I chose a basic enamel gray from Testor's. I used a small sponge brush to apply it, let it dry, and that was that. I let the paint dry overnight, removed the tape, and ran some trains.

Sometimes the simplest pleasures are the most enjoyable.



Read more about the whole project here.

#Straco

Total cost for the project:

Pegboard: $4.95
Flathead Screws: $0.40
Moulding: $2.49
SilClear: borrowed from a friend
Green Paint: left over from another project
Wood Screws: $3.60
Felt Pads: $1.99
Power Pack: $5.90
Small Houses: $3.00
Testor's Gray Paint: $1.29

Total Cost: $23.62