Street markings

I have always wanted to apply some sort of street markings on the Musashi-Koyama modules.  Adding the small expansion module with it's streets seemed like a good time to do it.

Shown in this photo is a Kato set of road stickers that is part of their Diotown series of products.  I would need quite a few of these to get enough of the white striping and they seem to be hard to find right now.  I did not even see them last year when I visited the Kato store in Tokyo.

On the Hot Springs junction module's station platforms I had used Builders in Scale HO scale yellow highway striping to create the platform edge warning line and had liked the results.  I posted about this in June of 2014 in a post titled Scratch built platforms - Part 3

So I picked up two versions of this same product in white at my local hobby shop.  One version has solid lines just like the yellow one and the other version has dashed line of varying lengths.

I was concerned that being HO scale the lines might look over sized but they are actually just a bit slimmer than the lines that are on the bases of some of the kits.  This photo shows a side by side comparison of a TomyTec bus stop base and my striping work on the Musashi-Modules.

To do the boundary lines I used a .010 x .250 strip of polystyrene as a guide lined up along the edge of the road and held in place with blue painters tape.  The painters tape I used is the type that is for delicate surfaces.  It takes a bit of practice to keep the lines straight.

I used a narrow paint roller handle with a hard plastic roller to press the lines down once they were in the right position.

Gentle curves like the one showed in this photo can easily be made.  I also did sharper curves around a 90 degree corner but those were quite a bit harder to do.

I had originally planned to use the dashed lines product for the cross walks but realized that it would create too narrow of a cross walk.

So I cut a 3/4 inch strip off the end of the solid line product to use for the cross walks.  This would scale out to about 10 ft or 3 meters which is about right.

When applying the cross walk lines I used a square cut piece of polystyrene sheet as a guide to line up the edges and the spacing between the lines was just done by eye with the spacing between the lines being the same as the line width.

The line ends were close but not perfect.  This flaw seems to be the most noticeable so I used a straight edge and a hobby knife with a new blade to even them up using the two shortest ones as a guide.  The cut off sections were then gently pulled away.




When all the basic lines and the cross walks were done, all of the streets were given a little weathering with Bragdon weathering powders and a coat of Testors Dullcoat.