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In this Canadian Canyons mini-series, the entire MRVP staff gets involved in shaping up the layout scenery! To get things started, Ben Lake and Gerry Leone combine their superpowers to model a curved mountain highway using a computer, a paper template, and a large sheet of styrene. Follow along, for a quick, easy, and contemporary way to make realistic roads!
This is an interesting way to make roads however its a little complicated and time consuming. It seems some in model railroading are overthinking things in the 21st century, As such we are fixing things that aren’t broken just because technology allows us to. Using this method how does one go about weathering the road considering the road surface is paper? I subscribe to Pelle Søeborg’s methods for roads that work well and look very realistic. Gary also had a viable and easy method he showed in an “Off the Rails” episode.
I just laid my road using the W S way, man I wished I could have seen this vid sooner, looks like a easier way to build your highways and not as messy either.
Very cool road building techniques. Never would have thought of doing it that way. Between Ben and Eric, your crew has a lot of computer brain power building this layout.
That’s a great way to produce a realistic looking roadway… quickly! Kudos. Any chance of making your Adobe Illustrator file of your roadway available to us (subscribers)? Sure would save us a huge amount of time.
Yet another way to build roads! Some day maybe my roads will get paved. Now they are all dirt and gravel.
Never did see how the blue tint was added to the color of the rocks, so I experminted with mine. If you add Delta Ceramcoat Dolphin Grey when doing the grey, it will leave a bluish tint to the grey rocks.
Enjoy every installment of these videos! Learn a lot.
Another excellent video. I was originally planning on building my road on the layout. This makes a lot more sense. We wouldn’t consider assembling our structure kits on the layout. Thank you again! MR Video Plus is worth the subscription price.
Given the prevalence of flatbed printers you could print directly on the styrene. Most sign shops have flatbed printers and this would save time and yield a higher quality, more durable road.
Think it helps to have a good (if not better) printer. Gerry, think you forgot to allow for the thickness of the blade when you made the splice cuts.
This looks good and thank you for the info so i can do it in HO.
To add a touch of road building realism all four of you needed helmets and been leaning on shovels 🙂 I guess you could have taken a photo from above the layout (including a scale on the surface) from a step ladder and used that photograph (and the scale) as a template for laying out the road? That is how DOH does it. Looking forward to more of this series. Thanks
Cool technique
pretty slick. Seems a bit complicated, but good road modeling tends to be. This project is in N scale, would this work in HO?