Let There Be Streets

Over the last few months I've added some streets and grade crossings to the layout. I wanted to have streets in place prior to making scenic contours and build the grade crossings prior to ballasting the track so I wouldn't have to excavate ballast away from the crossing locations.

Streets

For the streets themselves, I used 8-mm EVA foam purchased from Michael's. I've seen others make very convincing streets with EVA foam, and I had no interest in using plaster for streets again like I did on my first layout. I chose the 8 mm thickness so I wouldn't have to use multiple layers to get the road surface at an elevation slightly below the tops of the rails. 

The foam cuts nicely with a sharp X-acto knife, but I found I needed to change blades frequently to avoid getting a rough, tattered edge when the blade began to dull. I cut scale 24-foot-wide strips of foam from the roll and then trimmed them to fit on the layout. 

I used yellow carpenter's glue to attach the foam to the plywood tabletop. A plastic knife was handy to spread a thin layer of glue on the bottom of each piece of foam.  

The foam retained quite a bit of curvature from being rolled up. Real streets are a bit higher in the middle to promote drainage, but not quite to this level.

Quite a bit of weight was necessary to keep the foam flat while the glue dried. The wood spacer is there for more even weight distribution to avoid making impressions in the foam. The brown "distilled water" is water that I've used to clean paintbrushes, by the way. 

Success. A nice flat street.

I plan to paint the foam streets at a later date once I have the surrounding scenery in place.

The "Hill"

I get a little defensive when people deride Illinois (and other Midwestern states) as "flat and boring." Florida is extremely flat, and yet I never hear the same criticism leveled (pun intended) at the Sunshine State. While my native Peoria region has plenty of topographic relief, I do have to grudgingly admit that the area in and around El Paso that I'm modeling is indeed pretty flat. However, there are subtle differences in elevation that I hope to capture on the layout. The east-west downtown strip along Front Street that faces the TP&W is several feet above the track level, and the north-south streets dip down where they cross the tracks. I decided to add a small "hill" to the north-south street (Elm Street) that runs down the middle of the layout. I used two different sizes of wood shims to make the slopes with a piece of moulding between them to flatten out the crest. My Surform plane worked well to shape the moulding and I used a 60-grit sanding block to smooth out the transitions.

Paved Crossings

As best as I can tell from photos, most of the grade crossings in El Paso were of the type with a single railroad tie on either side of each rail and asphalt pavement up to and in between the ties. I built two curved crossings like this using styrene strips for the ties and lightweight spackling compound to fill the space between the rails. 

Both styrene "ties" have an L-shaped cross section. The outside ties were made by laminating 0.030" x 0.100" and 0.040" x 0.060" styrene strips to form an inverted L to clear the molded spike heads. The inner ties were made by laminating 0.040" x 0.080" and 0.020" x 0.100" styrene strips into an L for wider flangeways. I glued my faux ties to the actual ties using cyanoacrylate gel. The molded spike heads served as guides. 

I removed the cork roadbed within the street footprint so I could butt the foam right up against the track. I made a paper template for cutting the foam to the correct shape.

To clear the actual ties and roadbed, I had to make a notch in the underside of the foam. I first sliced the end of the foam parallel to the road surface, then made several light vertical passes on the bottom of the foam until I had connected the two cuts. A sharp, new knife blade was essential.

The plastic knife also made a good applicator for the spackling compound that I used to fill in the middle. A moistened scrap of foam worked well to smooth the spackle between the styrene "ties". The additional water caused the spackle to shrink a bit as it dried, so I came back later and applied a thin final coat. I lightly wet-sanded the finished surface with 320-grit sandpaper to both smooth the surface and remove the thin coating of spackle on the inner "ties."

 

I primed the "ties" on the first crossing I built with Vallejo gray primer prior to installation and figured I'd paint them later, but for the second crossing I spray-painted the "ties" with Rustoleum Camouflage Brown before I glued them down.  

Wood Crossings

For the two crossings on Elm Street, I used laser-cut wood crossings from Blair Line. These come in straight versions as well as curved versions in a number of different radii, and I thought they would be a simple, drop-in installation. Unfortunately, the wood crossings turned out to be the more difficult of the two types of crossings I made for the following reasons:

1. They're too thick for Code 83 track. The Blair Line wood pieces are 5/64" (0.078") to 3/32"(0.094") thick, in other words approximately equal to slightly greater than the 0.083" rail height. I built styrene jigs to hold the wood pieces in place and guide the final thickness as I sanded their bottom sides with 60-grit sandpaper. I thinned the pieces that go between the rails to approximately 0.060" thick. The outside pieces need to have an inverted "L" profile to clear the molded spike heads, so I thinned them to 0.030" and glued them to thin strips of 1/32" basswood.
2. The curved crossing is too short for a 2-lane street. The Blair Line 21-23" radius curved crossing is about the same width as the straight crossing, but a curved track takes a longer path through the street and therefore needs to be longer than a straight crossing. Luckily the Blair Line crossings come in packages of 2 so I had additional material available to lengthen my curved crossing, but of course now I don't have enough material left over for a second crossing.

My modified Blair Line crossings. The stock curved crossing has 4 sections but is too short, so I cut the 5th section to make it long enough to span the scale 24-foot-wide street. The outer pieces of the curved crossing at left are upside-down to show how I made them L-shaped to clear the molded spike heads.

I used an ebony Minwax stain marker to stain the wood crossings. 

The finished wood crossings.