Work begins on the 30th Avenue scene starting with the road and grade crossing itself. It’s a little tricky to model effectively because of the fairly distressed look of the pavement. In addition, the street goes right over a turnout.

To model the complex patterns of the pavement, I’m going to laminate a photo of an actual street onto styrene. The image above is a composite of a street photo from my own file (which I lightened) along with the edging from the prototype. I’ve uploaded a full size version of this image in the photo wallpaper section of the help section (scroll down to the last image).

There are seven pieces involved with the crossing and I now have the first two done. The timbers are from Blair Line. I heavily distressed them with a thick wire brush.