Model Railway Forum

I spotted this on the regular Hatton’s e-mail the other day and have decided to give it a go.
The kit arrived this morning - contents are a bottle of oily black paint (brush or airbrush) and a bag of what looks like grey talcum powder. I also ordered a bottle of their grimy track paint at the same time.
Sorry, no time to film an ‘unboxing video’.

It appears that the powder is brushed into the existing ballast to ‘clog up’ the gaps in the granules. Fixed in place with dilute PVA then painted. That’s the theory, practical tests to follow in due course.

20181220_132526 by Steve Mumford, on Flickr

Hoping to recreate something like this:

5367897B-D398-4F2C-A475-2A14E75B23B5 by Steve Mumford, on Flickr

Be interesting to see the results.

Mmm why not just use any powder such as plaster or talc and paint that? Just seems like another money spinner to me.

Walkingthedog wrote: ↑Thu Dec 20, 2018 8:29 pm Mmm why not just use any powder such as plaster or talc and paint that? Just seems like another money spinner to me.

You may well be right Brian. Or just a cynic.
Either way, it intrigued me and there’s no harm in trying it out.

Edit: just changed the smiley - could have been embarrassing.

Must admit Steve I’m a bit of a lover of things like that.

After fitting the signal lights to a couple more boards I added the powder from the kit to the standing areas in the station.

20181227_124919 by Steve Mumford, on Flickr

Sprayed the black paint on the tracks this morning - I think it has quite a nice sheen to the finish. I also changed the old Peco buffer to one of their new ‘bullhead’ versions.

20181228_121409 by Steve Mumford, on Flickr

There it is could not find this post when I looked yesterday.
That looks cracking Steve. The picture of the station looks fantastic. ........John