Track painting

This is a total pain......but well worth the effort.  I use my air brush and paint all track with Railroad Tie Brown paint.  It is acrylic and once dry super strong. Now - the turnouts I use rely (for now) on the points of the switch making contact with the rail to transfer power to the frog or the center of the turnout.  Paint where they touch and no electricity and trains stop.  So I put a piece of painter's tape over each set of points (about 40 turnouts now) as well as the little rivet that holds the blades in place before I spray.  Don't want paint to wick into the joint and kill electrical contact or paste the blade to the tie.  As well I paint the ties that are cast in a brown plastic that is shiny and not quite the right color.

So I spray everything, then quickly clean off the tops of the rail with a cleaning block before the paint really sets up.  It basically drys when it hits the track, but only really hardens after more time.  Take off the tape after spraying, and you are left with some zebras as you see in the photo. Yuch

So today I started to paint the rail sides that are showing with a micro brush and more railroad tie brown.  Got about 1/3 of the way through the layout and needed to quit for the day.

The locomotive you see I was using to test the electrical transmission once I removed the tape to see if I had mis-sprayed paint int the blade area - but all 40 tested out fine.

Part of why I paint the track is so it is dull brown, and once ballasted with scale rock it will look good. The track I use is Peco code 55 made in the UK. Great stuff.  Not exactly American track/tie profiles, but I don't care.  Paint it and ballast it and it looks really good.  If you want to see what a pro does, look at Tom Danneman's DRGW layout - in N scale, that uses the same track and turnouts.   Also - this track is totally bulletproof. Wonderful product.