Kato Unitrack Weathering Update
In the last Kato Unitrack article, we masked the rails on our track before painting. We took this extra step to keep the color of the gray roadbed untouched to allow for a better color blend when we added the Kato ballast. By painting the rail sides, we also eliminate any metal from the rail sides shining through in close-up photos. Here’s a quick photo update on this project.
Once the rails were painted gray, we added a thin wash of Tamiya Red / Brown, XF-64 paint to simulate light and spotty rust. It’s always tempting to go very rusty, it’s a cool look, but we wanted a basic, generic look to our track here. Next up we added the Kato ballast to the HO, N and Z scale scenes. This one ballast size is actually pretty close to the molded ballast size on all three scale roadbeds.
The final step was to add some road grime on, and around, the base of the rails. Tamiya German Grey, XF-63 was used for our road grime color. This was applied using a Paasche H airbrush with a very thin paint-to-air blend. It’s easy to add too much road grime, several very light coats lets you control the final grime density nicely.
The overall appearance of the scenery and track is minimal here, as mentioned these “scenes” were built so we could have a good platform to photograph our products on and we can now quickly add trees, more ground foams, etc., to fill out the scenes as needed. There are lots of articles online showing how customize Kato Unitrack to give it a more realistic look, check them out and as important, try your hand with your own techniques.
Category: Raildig Build Projects
