Can you tell that I’m teasing you with the coffee table pictures at the beginning of my posts? You can see it in this picture, once you get past the excitement of Jay opening an airplane box. By the way, this is the same level of excitement that he shows when opening up boxes of model railroad track. Ask me how I know…

Now that our road pieces are dry we can continue working on them. First you need to paint them black, or whatever color you want them to be. If you were going to make a brick road then you would paint that finish on your road pieces. Jay decided to go with regular asphalt. To make the lines on the road he used masking tape as stencils and sloppily painted the yellow on them.

See how nicely that turns out!

If you have miles and miles of roads this might get a bit tedious. At that point you could probably just not put the lines on at all. When people ask you about it you can say that the state workers haven’t had time to put the lines on in between breaks. Add some yellow cones, orange barrels and Men At Work signs for realism. Do NOT add construction workers because this will turn your scene from a fairly realistic one to a fantasy-filled layout. At that point you might as well add some zombies and dragons.

Use the same masking tape stencil idea to make lines in various parking lots that you might have in your layout.

Don’t forget to add the curb stops, too!

We aren’t quite done, but you have to feel a sense of accomplishment so add all of your details back into the display to see how good it’s looking.

We have some more details to add. On either side of your crossings you might need to do some detail work. Don’t forget to add the markings to the pavement on either side of the crossings, too.

Add some dark shading around the roads and buildings. After all, it’s not often that you see grass growing right up to the edge of the roads. At least, not where I live.

For the last time add your details and secure them. If you have telephone/power poles in your layout be sure to add the lines running between them. I believe that Jay used black thread for this scene.

Again, make sure to view it from all angles to check everything out. Is there something missing? Does it look odd in one spot? Did you accidentally leave a spot bare and it doesn’t jump out at you until you walk around it?

And here it is! Jay built the frame and enclosed it in glass.

He wired it up to a controller and plugged it in. It’s a very interesting piece of furniture.

As you can see, we have it sitting in our front living room. It’s not often plugged in and running, though.

Recently Jay decided to use an Arduino board to control the train. He did a simple program and tested it out on the coffee table. Once it was proved to work he then moved it downstairs because he’s going to program it to do some more complicated things on the big layout.

While he had the top piece of glass off he decided to clean the tracks. The trains don’t run very well if they are dirty.

Luckily he was closely supervised to make sure that he was doing it correctly. Chester sure is a good supervisor!