Trying Out Some Track Painting

Ever since I decided to start building my office shelf layout, I've known that I would need to do more work with the track than I did with the nursery wall layout. For that all I did was nail it down on top of some cork roadbed and called it good. That was fine then, but for this project I want to make it look as realistic as possible, which means getting into ballasting and painting the track.

So the other night I was working on laying out some track for the office shelf layout and I decided to take a few extra pieces of straight track and make myself a quick and easy display piece for testing out ballasting and track painting. It was at that point I realized I didn't have an good tie or rail colored paints with my modeling stuff, so I went searching around the basement and found a gallon of paint that the former owners left when they moved out back in the summer. It was a nice looking darkish brown, so I figured why not try it out? Here's what I came up with.

A look at the before and after for the brown paint I found in the basement

A look at the finished paint job

In case anyone was wondering, the paint I used was actually a porch and patio floor paint from BEHR. The color is listed as dark walnut. It doesn't really look all that bad if you ask me.

A look at the lid of the BEHR paint I used to paint the track

Just based on the fact that I threw this idea together in like 10 minutes and I used leftover paint that someone else bought and left in my basement, it looks pretty good. It may not be 100% realistic, but it's close enough for me and looks much better than the black ties that these used to be.