All the road surfaces for the city region are done and covered with 4-ply Bristol Board. I basically ended up making my own foam core with 3/4" foam and the Bristol Board adhered with 3M Spray Glue. As you will read many years later, the 3M77 failed and a ceiling leak exacerbated the situation and the road surface buckled badly and all of it had to be replaced. I'm now using Liquid Nails General Purpose Adhesive. Hopefully that will work better. 3M also has a stronger spray adhesive, 3M99 that works better too.
This pic also shows another alignment of the buildings which I like better. It really shows off Saulena's and the Candy store. There's lots of possibilities with this town.
Here's the station area with parking. That was a bit difficult to measure and cut especially since I was on my last piece of Bristol Board and was trying to piece it together to use as many odd-shaped left-overs as I could. It's almost $7 a sheet so I didn't want to waste any of it.
Once all the covering and fitting was done, I sanded the raised edges of the Bristol Board and prepared the sheets to fill the gaps between joined covering sheets.
I put the first two coats of filler and while it's drying decided to make a trial piece of highway to experiment with colors, traffic lines, etc. I took some scrap foam and Bristol Board and created a small piece of road.
I used artists brush-on acrylic paints for this first attempt. Here's the palette.
Colors are Slate Gray, Black, White, Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna and Yellow. The yellow is a nice full-bodied color and looks great for highway lines. I made a warmish gray using some burnt sienna and yellow.
I also spent a few hours researching highway markings and signage. I love the internet. I found great examples of all the signs in Wikipedia, but they didn't explain the size. I then downloaded the entire Unified Manual of Traffic Control Devices which is 892 pages and published by the US DOT.
I was able to import the signs and scale them using my CorelDraw methods and am including them in this post. They are all scaled for O'scale. I'm printing out the signs on Avery 8153 2X4" shipping labels so I can cut them out and stick them onto styrene and make my own signs. I'm going to need a lot of them and didn't want to go broke buying plastic ones. Besides, I know these are dead-on correct size.
I also downloaded and a scaled road paint markings that I can use in various places.
Center lines on non-expressways are 100mm wide, stop lines in front of intersections are 400mm wide as well as stop lines at RR crossings. They're included at the bottom and are full-size to be printed by you.
I chose to use the road-paint templates as stencils and printed them out, put some spray glue on and then stuck them to some left over Bristol Board and tediously cut them out to make stencils. 4-ply bristol is a bear to cut and it was a slow process that needs improving. Either I'm going to use a less dense sheet or cut the characters out and stick them directly onto the roadway.
After cutting the template I tried it out. It actually worked.
Here's the stencil in place for spraying and then the finished test piece.
The finished piece has a little overspray, but I really didn't spend much time ensuring that it was really down flat.
Notice, I also stuck one of my paper facsimile manhole covers on the street. Since this "street" was made with two chunks of scrap Bristol Board, I decided to treat one part as if it was a road patch, using a blacker (newer) asphalt color and some gloss black around the edges as if sealed by pitch after the patch was done. The "Rs" have a gap since to make a stencil work with letters with holes, you need some piece of the body left to hold the hole. I will go back and lightly touch up this on the finished job.
