Episode 8: Playing Sim City: Part 2

Last time I talked about buildings and my town/village scene. These need to inevitably be accompanied by some roads.

As per usual there's a range of options... 

We could paint the road on. This option is preferred by many modellers and looks very good. However my predicament is that the entire board is covered with ballast-mat and whilst stripping it off in patches is an option; stripping it down to the bare wood again is going to be difficult. 

We could opt for a tarmac coloured scatter, but these may provide the same or similar texture as the green (grass) and I don't think that would feel right...

...So I've found some of this! It's sticky back road-in-a-strip from Gaugemaster and it's pretty cheap. 

I've also got myself some of these! Little sticky paving slabs.

First job is to mark out where you want your road to be constructed.

Then strip back the ballast-mat with a chisel. The goal is to get as much of the wood showing as possible but it is OK if it's not 100%. We are going to stick over it after all! Just as long as it's as smooth as you can manage!

This was both messy and irritating but eventually the area looked something like this!

The paving slabs are sticky - but with the stuck on walls of my old plastic buildings fresh in my mind, it's likely that overtime they will become unstuck. Also don't forget they're not going down onto a completely dust free and even surface!

I therefore will lay them out first to get an idea of how they look and then glue them down with PVA. (This is actually recommended by Metcalfe). 

The road is opened! (I wish they'd finish the roadworks on the M1 this quickly...). Looks good actually!

Now that I'm happy with the way it looks and where it is, I can expand as necessary to a larger town plan. I used tweezers to help me lift and replace the tiles. It took all day but the result is worth it.

Here is a work in progress shot. The problem with planning out the town is I've had to do it on quite an ad-hoc basis. It's difficult to quite judge the size of buildings in the shop, but hopefully I've left room for future additions.

I'm also going to future proof the layout by not modelling heavily over the gap in the two boards. i.e. keeping roads at 90 degree angles and not continuing on complex scenery. This should theoretically allow me to one day add a 3rd board in the middle to extend the layout outwards... but this is way off in the future... 

At present I'm waiting for things to dry so more pictures coming soon!