I think I'll try this one out on a few scraps of masonite first.

My skill (??) with my double-action airbrush probably isn't quite up to this fine a task quite yet.

Ah, new challenges. (sigh) 

Interesting approach.... might have to try it.

I do have one question - when did the solid yellow stripe approach begin in the US?  Was this used in the early 1950's in some parts of the country and changed to a national standard sometime in the 1960's?

When I started to get interested in cars (OK, 1964-1965 in South Carolina), all road striping was done with dashed white lines in the middle, and adjacent solid yellow lines to indicate no passing zones.  A no passing zone (both ways) would have dashed white lines in the middle, and solid yellow on both sides of that dashed line.  No passing on one side would result in dashed white lines in the middle, and solid yellow on the side of the road where passing was prohibited.    This was expensive, reqired 2 colors of paint, and my hunch is that the interstate system caused striping standards to be uniform nationally.

I haven't seen anything on this, but do have pictures from the early 1960's that show this.

Tom Gordon
Atlanta, GA

I am a Novice (note the capital N) and really enjoy all the articles. I am a member of the local Railroad club and have taken over an area that requires a road and some parking areas. This article is a big help. In addition, I would like to find templates or decals for railroad crossings, but so far have had no luck finding this.

Keep up the great work

Try these for stencils (S&S Hobby Products):

http://www.walthers.com/exec/search?manu=643&split=30

"I do have one question - when did the solid yellow stripe approach begin in the US?  Was this used in the early 1950's in some parts of the country and changed to a national standard sometime in the 1960's?"

Adopting the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (or minor variations thereof) meant a lot of standardizing in the US during the 1970s.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_on_Uniform_Traffic_Control_Devices

"When I started to get interested in cars ..., all road striping was done with dashed white lines in the middle, and adjacent solid yellow lines to indicate no passing zones." 

I remember seeing the "no passing zone" striping with the dashed white lines between the double yellow lines (or adjacent to single yellow lines for passing in one direction) into the mid-late1970s in rural Utah, along with dashed white lines between lanes with opposing traffic.  I don't recall any instances of a single yellow stripe as depicted in Charlie's article, so if that existed here it was before my time (born 1968).

I would like to add my experiance to this article. I have found that if I use 3M 1/16" Fine Line Tape #218/06301 for the center stripe which equals a 6" real world stripe put down the middle of the road and then put another strip of 1/16" tape on each side of the middle one. Pull the middle tape out now you have your basic solid middle strip. Now I put down 3M 1/4" Fine Line Tape #218/06306 overlap the 1/16" tape. This give you a wider area to then cover with paper to protect your road. You don't have to be so careful when air brushing. Both of these tapes are VERY thin & flexible so they are easy to get to go around curves and give you a very sharp edge. They are available at a speciality paint store for auto body shops. In my area it is "Painter's Supply". This technique works well for solid strips. Now for dashed lines I would leave the two outer strips of tape on and then put a piece of tape across at 90 deg. (I now use "FrogTape" available at Wal-Mart or big box store) for this because it seals much better then either masking or blue painters tape. The spacing I use is a scale 15' for the strip & 25' between the strips. Cover the area you want to leave unpainted. For the Yellow no passing zones, I re-tape the ctr. stripe, leave the two outer pieces on , then add another 1/16" piece of tape up against them, remove the two pcs. that are to be the yellow stripe. This sounds like a lot of work but it is worth it because the lines come out GREAT. Weather the road after this is done.

I have used these and they work great. You just have to tape them down very securely and clean them about every second or third time you spray. I have found that Model Masters solvent based paint "Flat White" works very well. I normally won't use solvent based paints but have found in this application they work better then acrylics which will bleed under the stencil edges.

The tape seemed a little tedious to me while the styrene forms made more sense.  On the curves I understand the need for the tape. 

Of course the road looks fantatic!

Not sure when yellow center lines became the standard, but I do know that white lines were the standard in Ontario at least until sometime in the sixties.

Roy

standardization in the 1970's.  In California, the standard color for all striping on roads was white until sometime around 1960.  Even then a lot of roads continued to have white stripes until the state, county, or city that was responsible for a particular road's maintainance got around to repainting.  On many rural roads the lines are occasionally still white.  I have never seen white and yellow lines combined on California roads.

Excellent article!  I really enjoy Charlie's articles on easy detailing jobs.

Rob,

Thanks for the info... Maybe I ought to read my Walthers Catalog once in a while..

Thanks again

Al Behler

Using a calipers to place the tape seems to be a LOT more work than needed. If it were me, I would just slap down a strip of blue masking tape over the general area. Then I would fasten two #11 blades together with some kind of spacer to get the line width and make a double cut down the length of the tape and peel the center off.

Since I don't do air brushing, I would just paint the line.

But the article did get me thinking about putting that center line down. In the East, the line would be white (yellow didn't come into use until maybe the '70s). There would be a single line for most of the roads, but later on they used a double line for "no passing" and a dashed line for passing zones. Marking the outside edges didn't start until the mid to late '60s around here, and rural roads didn't see them until much later.

Mike

I could only go by the car in your example but it looks like the era is in the fiftys. I'll confirm what others have said that here in Arizona, the highway department didnt <generally> start using yellow striping until the very late sixties. Before, everything was white, striped as previously indicated. I was born in 1944 and got my driver's license in 1960 and still can remember way back in the Jurrasic period.

Nice article. I also use 1/16" pin striping tape for center lines. I've just about mastered curves. I havent heard of frog tape, I'll have to give it a try on a road on my layout. (Gilbert Model Railroad Club, Town of Gilbert, AZ www.GMRC.org)

Nice job on the convincing looking gray asphalt. I'm still working on the color mix for that, too.

Vetadmiral <Dave Hunt>

Great ideas, Charlie.  And thanks to other's posts as well!

George

what is a double action air-brush, and is it nessiary to use one or will a regular air-brush work?

A double action airbrush controls both airflow and paint flow with the same trigger.  A "single action" airbrush uses the trigger to control airflow only, and has a separate adjustment for paint. Highway striping doesn't require fine control and your "regular" airbrush should work just fine.

Charlie,

great article, but how to do this without an article.

One answer is to voluntare my son whos got one....

Vetadmiral - Dave?,

Thank you for the input on that in Arizona "the highway department didnt <generally> start using yellow striping until the very late sixties"

Is there any place to look for more information on this.

BTW, Here in Norway  as long as I can remember, we have used the yellow stripes to indicate that the trafic on both sides of the yellow stripes drives in different directions. The white stripes tells us that the trafic goes in the same directions.,

I like this system better than the all white system used in (most of?) the rest of Europe.

I am in the planning stages of my layout. I anticipate making a couple of highways that coulod benefit from striping. This article is right on time for me.

Thanks for including it in this issue,

May all your trains be on time,

Dan Harriman

Orange Texas

As most people have mentioned the yellow striping is pretty new and basically very post transition period modeling.  In the 50's the family would travel by car from SoCal to Ohio annually until we finally in the early 50's took the ATSF El Capitain in its pre-high level days.  In the western US most of the states had the single (passing allowed), double (no passing) and single solid-one dashed (no passing, passing allowed) white marking system.  Heck I can even remember the yellow octagon stop signs. 

I live the suggested method, yes it involves a lot of effort, but it is worth the effort to produce the results.

Thanks for the article.

Tom VanWormer

I admire the Author for doing the road markings the way he did, but labor intensive indeed. For years I have been using the remnants of computer cut plastic signwriting sheets where there were remains of the sheets narrow enough for this purpose including 'N' scale loco pin striping. It was always easy and quick, stuck permanently, and colors were never a problem. Another method which is probably the same is using motor vehicle pinstriping material. Both these methods can be protected by using sprayon matt finish.

Creating a micro Inglenook and have found both the Zip Texturing and now this Easy Highway Striping article to be timely and helpful.  I appreciate the concise, clear, easy-to-read articles you are featuring.   Thank you for adding to my enjoyment of model railroading.

Roy Simpkins

Raleigh, NC

My experience with painters tape has not been very successful. First, I seem to get a buildup of paint along the edges next to the tape and when it is removed  there is a noticable ridge. Also, when I remove the tape, no matter how careful I am at putting it down , there is almost always some bleeding of the paint under the tape. Should the tape be removed before or after the paint is completely dry?  Thanks for any help.

The following information is from the automotive paint world. It should apply to modeling as well since physics are physics.

Tape should be removed either immediately after applying paint while the paint film is still almost liquid - OR - after the paint is fully dried. The worst time to remove tape is when the paint is "somewhat dry". If the tape is removed when the paint is semi-liquid then there is no tearing of the paint film. If the tape is removed after the paint is fully dried then the paint film is torn by the tape during removal however the paint has developed enough adhesion to the painted object so as to be able to tolerate this. In between these two extremes is where edge sharpness problem during tape removal becomes a problem.

Bleed under tape is caused by insufficient pressure to the tape during application. If the surface is rough then even with adequate pressure there may still be gaps. Using tape for a paint edge works best on smooth surfaces.

Green semi-transparent 3M fine line tape is often preferred since the tape changes from opaque to semi-see through when sufficient pressure has been applied to the PSA backing. The tape also has an extremely well cut sharp edge. Vinyl tapes (painters blue) make curves better but there is no means of knowing when every bit of the tape is 100% in contact with the protected object leading to unexpected bleed.

On a related note, fog lines (marking the boundaries of the road) are a relatively recent development.  I can't remember seeing them anywhere in the 50's and 60's in the Midwest.

I'm modeling 1956 eastern Colorado  The strips were white, no edge strips. No passing zones were few and far between.  Pictures i have seen on curves had the white strip in between the solid yellows with what looked like a good 12" separation between the white and yellow strips.  I grew up in Houston, Texas, again white strips.  My family made a trip through Louisiana on US 90 east one time before heading north to Arkansas.  I remember several things about that road. It was so dark at night crossing that portion of Louisiana (my Dad liked to leave on trips at 4:00 AM) that you could not tell how high you were above the swamps. I remember that it was concrete, how narrow the road was and how much traffic there was.  We got behind a semi that was running about ten mile per hour under the 45 mph speed limit and to a ten year old it felt like it took an hour to finally get around him. The centerline was a white strip on a black background with yellow no passing solid strips on the edges of the black.  The black strip appeared about 18" wide total with a 6" white strip in the center.  I also remember crossing bayous and sloughs on narrow through truss bridges that did not tell you what the name of the bayou or slough was but it had a sign on the top cross members that declared that this was another Huey P. Long Bridge.  The road was elevated and the safety devices were right on the edges of the road making it feel that the road was even narrower  They were a steel cable (two wire) system mounted on round wooden posts with rounded tops and a black strip close to the top of the post.  It's amazing that afte all these years of Jersy Barriers that cable arrestors have been reintroduced for center medians here in Colorado.  US287 through Oklahoma in the Sixtys and early Seventies was a classic rounded two lane blacktop road with no strips just grooves for tires on each side of the center and rough edges.  If it had strips they were long gone and when it rained the road was "Slicker than owl s__t!"

I really like these articles.  I was so glad when you started these on a monthly deal.  I also like the way you have it set up to be able to go to the advertisers web site and find out more about their products.  While doing this and also reading this article, it came to me that it would also be really nice to be able to download not just the full magazine but just the article that you know you will be needing in the near future.  I remember that I have read an article some where about something but can never find it.  By being able to download just the article I can keep it handy until I need it.  Please consider this for you future articles. Randy

Randy:

The reason why MRH is free is because it has a number of ads along with the content.

Individual articles could not have enough ads to cover the cost of production, so we would have to charge for them.

Nice idea, but if you want free articles, they need to be bundled together with ads, since the ads cover the cost.

For all my N scale layouts, I have painted the road stripes with a ruling pen.  I load the pen with slightly thinned enamel paint using a paint brush.  The lines are consistent in both color and thickness.

The problem today may be locating such a pen today.  They are not as widespread in today's computer age.  I still have mine from my high school drafting class.

"The problem today may be locating such a pen today.  They are not as widespread in today's computer age.  I still have mine from my high school drafting class."

     Maybe try ebay, must be tons of these things floating around somewhere?  I still have mine from the old days too along with some Rapidograph pens....DaveB 

All great ideas but for those of us without an airbrush here is how I stripe my roads. If I am using plain white sheet styrene I draw a line right now the middle with a pencil. Then take 1/32" chart pac tape and lay it just on one side of the line just touching it. Do this ti both sides of the line so there is a slight spacing. Then paint the road the concrete color. Weather it it a bit, then pull up the tape carefully. Theres my white stripes. If I need dashed stripes, do the same, just take a very sharp knife and carefully make evenly spaced cuts down the stripe. Peel up the cuts and paint. If you want yellow stripes, spray the center of the road with flat yellow. You can actually buy highway yellow paint in spray cans. Lay the stripes just like for white stripes. Pull the tape when done. Yellow center stripes.