Roads often play a secondary, scenic role on layouts, but given the fact that the Wisbech & Upwell was a tramway, my road has a much more prominent part to play. Initially, I painted the road with grey acrylic, but it created a nasty rough finish when it dried. My usual road making technique is to mix Woodland Scenics Asphalt and White Earth paint, which dries to a lovely flat, matt and road-like finish. While I was building the layout, I took delivery of a pack of Noch road marking templates featuring different markings, and I used them here.
To hide the joins in the two pieces of mounting card, I filled the gap with Deluxe Materials’ Perfect Plastic Putty and left it to dry before prepping and painting.
Noch’s road marking kit contains a template, bendable ruler and white marking pencil. The ruler ensures consistency of the road markings.
I reverted to my preferred road-making method: mix some Woodland Scenics Asphalt and white Earth Colours in a plastic dessert tub. Mix thoroughly – you don’t want a streaky road.
I find that once the paint is dry, a light rub with some very fine Tamiya Finishing Abrasives removes any imperfections and tones down the surface for a neat finish.
I covered the entire baseboard with mounting card, after laying the track to build up the level of the land around the track. Here is where the road will go.
I thought that Tamiya’s Finishing Abrasives would make light work of this, and they were ideal for removing the grooves in the road – but it took a lot of rubbing down!
I used grey acrylic from a hobby store to paint the road – but the brush marks dried like this. A road with pronounced grooves on it is not very realistic.
To show the difference just a few road markings make, compare the left of the picture with the right.
Here are the finished road and goods yard. I don’t use the Asphalt neat as it’s a bit too dark, which is why I mixed it with white.