Backdrop prep and Track painting

With a couple of sessions in the books and the new ICG track working like I want, I felt it was time to move onto the next phase of the area:  Painting the backdrop and track.

I did to the backdrop what I have done with it elsewhere before painting it, I first had to remove the Panhead screws that I used to secure it with originally and replace them with Flathead screws after countersinking them.  Once done I used lightweight Spackling to fill in the holes and the seams.

I also filled all the seams between the ceiling tiles with more lightweight spackling and painted the surface with my generic brown latex paint after the spackling had dried overnight.

There are a couple areas that did not get painted yet.  The area in Winnfield where Union Scrap is located at will get painted once the final location for the tracks have been decided upon and the area between the tracks and the fascia, which may get some excavation in time? 

Next up, painting of the track.

In the past I just used Rustoleum dark brown camo for the tracks, but afterwards I always had reservations about it in the fact that it was too dark for older, less maintained track?

So this time I did a little more soul searching and came up with a new idea.  After seeing what Greg did on his FreeMo-N sections and using his airbrush to paint groups of ties in different colors, I thought I'd try that?

Well I just don't have that kind of patience I guess?  So I did the next best thing.  I picked up a couple more rattle cans of lighter browns and thought I'd try painting everything with the three shades of brown.

The sample section I did, didn't turnout horrible, so I pressed on.  The first coat was with the Dark Camo, I covered the tracks with roughly a 75% coverage. I followed that with the Rustoleum Brown and misted it on patchy then followed that coat with the lighter Krylon Bark Corteza, misting it on with an even less coverage.  It may not be perfect, but it gave me a nice variation in color. 

Even though none of the ties are individually colored as of now, I plan to go back and use Tamiya Panel Liner to add some individual colors to the ties.

The sample track looked ok to me and considering that this is N scale, I don't think it will stand out like it might if it was HO or larger, but it does give me a subtle difference.  In the image below towards the center you can see where I used the gray and went back over it with the black to make some look like they are sun-bleached.

My next step is to repaint the backdrop to cover the screw holes then start painting the hills and tree line.