Roadwork in Malvern, part 2

Last night I got a coat of paint on the new roads and was able to get the buildings set back in place.

I don't think they turned out too bad?  However, I think I prefer the use of styrene for roads, but the jury is still out on this.  With plaster you can do just about anything but there are drawbacks.  

The main one is it's messy as hell, both in mixing and in sanding them.  Almost as bad as sanding drywall mud.  I had my vacuum handy and was always using it to keep the dust down.  Even then it got everywhere and it actually changed the color of the ballast in places.  One thing I learned, I need to pour the roads before ballasting.  At least I think it would be better and I wouldn't have had to be so careful with the plaster.  Oops.

Using the Woodland Scenics Foam Tape to make forms for the plaster was pretty slick.  I did have a few issues where it stuck too good the surface and I had to go back and pick it off with a knife.  It did do a pretty decent job of keeping a nice clean edge to the plaster.

It was also kind of hard to keep the surface level with some of the large odd shapes I dealt with in Malvern, which meant a lot of sanding.

Regardless of styrene or plaster, you have to keep it down below the rail head otherwise you will be constantly repainting the area every time you clean track.  As I was testing the crossings with a loco, I went back with a #17 X-acto blade and scraped the plaster down below the rail heads and repainted.

None of these are a real bridge burner though, but at least with styrene there is no sanding dust to deal with. However trying to cut and fit styrene can be a bit of a trick, and of course the cost is probably a bit higher.

Anyway enough analyzing, here are the results of my efforts. 

Crushmoore's asphalt parking lot.

Heavy Metal's storage pad and the street.

W&OV's asphalt driveway

The road to Olin-Chlor

A couple of "over all" shots of the area.

I still need to go back and scribe some lines in the roads and Heavy Metal's pad for concrete relief grooves, add some pot holes and patches, striping and then weather things a bit. But all in due time, at least it feels good to make some visually interesting progress.

I think once I get some ground goop spread around and the first layer of foam down, things will start to pop.