Truth be told, many projects work out to be quite different than we pictured them when we started. Not this one - the look in the photos and videos below is exactlywhat I have had in mind for the last six years - a lonely, isolated two-lane county road meandering through dry western countryside: southern Colorado/northern New Mexico. This is my second attempt at the road. I posted several weeks ago when I gave up with my original plan to use Atlas track to make 'Streets roads. Since then I have removed all of the Atlas track and finished this section complete with terrain. This road is made with EZ-Street road segments. I have used only D21 curves, but cut sections in each stock curve section and inserted short straight sections so that, from the standpoint of the tractor trailers I will eventually run on this road, all the curves will look like 27 inch or wider radius to them. The completed section, show, is only nine feet of road (seventeen and one half lane feet). I have another 85 lane-feet to go but know now how to build it and that it works.
The technique used to built the road is pretty much as for my city streets as explained in an article in OGR run 256 excep the 1/2 inch gap between the two lanes is filled with auto body filler (Bondo), and there are no parking lanes, just slopeg shoulders that start flush with the road and run out a scale five feet (Bondo covered with fine ballast for for gravel). The road is crowned a scale 8 inches and deliberately made just a bit wavey and sligthly skewed (not perfectly level side to side) in places so it does not look too perfect, etc. I tried various colors of paint and settled on that shown, a Benjamin Moore flat wall color called Revere Pewter. Darker color looks better from the standpoint of making the metal rails less promnient to the eye, but makes the road stand out starkly against the countryside, which is not the look I want. The road stripes are white, not yellow: this is the mid '50s, nearly twenty years before the Manual on Uniform Traffice control Devices and its yellow lines were adopted nationwide . I started to install a barbed wire fence about ten feet back from the edge of the road, but didn't like the look - I may revisit that idea later. There definately will be Burma Shave signs eventually.
So far, I have less than nine feet of road completed - about 17.5 lane-feet of road, as shown in these two views here.
But it looks great, the road running through countryside bracketed by train tracks front and in the rear.
Here is one of my city buses heading uphill (2.5% rise here). (Short videio because it only has eight and one half feet it can go).
And a two axle delivery truck heading downhill.