Painted Rails

First up, I've just added a new link to a new blog on my "Blogs I Follow list" this week.  

Consolidated Motive Power Services is the name of the site. Dave has commented on here several times, and from what I see, it certainly looks like he is a really talented modeler with a keen eye for detail. Click on the CMPS name at my list, or you can just click on this link  https://cmps2013.blogspot.com/ and check it out !

I got a bit of a start on assembling my Walthers Pellet Transfer kit which I want to add to the MidWest Plastics plant, replacing the temporary silos that I have there. Here's a promotional picture of the kit from Walthers.

I opened up the box, and the first thought that came to mind was..."Yikes!".  There are a lot of really fine molded parts in this kit, particularly the piping, and the base is the only thing not molded in shiny white plastic.  The kit includes 4 silos, but I think I only want to use 3 of them.  The instruction sheet mentions that it can be kitbashed using fewer silos, but gives no real help or advice on doing so. It looks to me like assembling this is going to take me some time, lots of care, and quite a bit of painting.

I should also mention that I'm going to have to modify the recessed area of my MidWest Plastics plant itself, no matter how many silos I use.  Too bad I didn't have this kit first so that then I could have built the plant around it.  Oh well.

As the post title suggests, the only actual progress made on the layout was that I managed to paint a total of about 12 feet or so of track that I showed here back on December 14th. 

The view before I painted the track this week.

I masked off the points on 4 track switches, and also lifted out 2 of my large industrial buildings and the highway overpass altogether to prevent getting paint overspray all over them.  Here's a look at how the area looked with the buildings removed before spraying.

You can see the spur leads for the two industrial buildings that I lifted out before airbrushing.

I sprayed the rails with ModelFlex Rail Brown (the colour name makes sense) through the airbrush.  The tracks that were painted include a main, a run-around siding, and the leads into three industry spurs.  As soon as the painting was finished, I cleaned the rail heads off with a Peco track cleaner, and then replaced the buildings.  Ran an engine around on a test run and everything worked well, so I guess that project is done and over with.  The whole process took under 2 hours.

And below is that same location again as I showed two weeks ago, but with the rails painted.  Looks a lot better now.

Have a great week everybody...and a very Happy New Year to you all.