How to Make EASY Concrete Roads On Foam4 min read

There are a ton of products out there to help you create awesome concrete roads for your model railroad layout. A lot of them are great and they end up looking really nice, but they can take a while and some of the products can be a little pricey.

Using some of the tips that we’ve picked up from around the model railroading world along with some of our own added touch, we want to show you how we’re making our concrete roads on our layout with just some simple tools, insulation foam, acrylic paints, and some weathering chalks.

What we used:

Hobby Knife (use safety protection)
HO Scale Rule
Brushes
Sponge
Weathering Pigments
Acrylic Paints
Insulating Foam
Cardstock

How we did it:

The first step was to use a flat, blemish-free piece of foam (it might already be glued down on your layout as a base), and measure out your road using your scale rule. Brett showed us this measuring out a 20-foot wide road since that’s a minimum standard of clearance for most roads in the United States. If you’re adding a shoulder, you might want to add 4 scale feet to either side for a total of a 28-foot wide road.

Cutting the lines for the road:

Once the width of the road is measured out, we cut in our concrete relief cuts, in real life, this is done to keep the road from severely cracking when the ground moves and freezes, but we all know that works sooo well with our roads… Sarcasm. The relief cuts were also cut in 20-foot increments for the length of the road.

It was also at this moment that we added some cracks and aging features to the road. This is an optional step and entirely up to you. Have a little fun with some creative freedom and add some fine cracks or potholes to the road.

Painting the Road

After cutting the lines into the foam where desired, the next step is to apply two coats (or enough to cover the green/purple foam completely) of your road colored paint. We used a mix of steel gray and khaki to achieve our concrete color and we advise you to experiment with mixing your road color on a piece of scrap foam before applying it to your diorama or layout.

We also mixed our road paint up in a resealable mason jar as we’re going to be creating a lot of road for our city and don’t want to have to keep re-mixing the paint and want to eliminate irregularities in matching up our concrete colors. Not that all the concrete will be the same color in a city, but for this stretch of road, we wanted it to match for a stretch.

Next, we go back over our two coats of paint with a sea sponge and add a VERY LIGHT peppering/speckling of white and a darker gray color from our road. This adds the effect of a poured concrete where you’d typically see darker and lighter areas inside the cured concrete.

Once each coat of paint is dry, it’s time to add lines (if you want). We cut a template to sponge on our center yellow line and keep the line length consistent. The line we cut into the cardstock was 1 foot wide and 6 feet long. This keeps the line length the same and prevents us from using a tape product to mask off a line, potentially peeling the existing road paint off. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Weathering the Road

Road painted and lines down, it’s time for us to weather the road and add some tire lines from the everyday wear that the road would experience!

This is a simple and fun part of the process for us, but we love weathering. All you’ll need for this step is a couple of brushes and your weathering pigments or chalk dust. I like to use have a fan brush on-hand for some tread and tire wear marks on the road.

The key is to highlight the cracks, relief cuts, and any defects or wear in your road with darker chalk. Then you go back and add your tire tread wear lines you’d see on any old road from constant traffic. This part of the weathering will look startling and too vivid. It’s okay though, we’ll fix it next!

To “dull” out your harsh dark weathering, we go back over the road with gray and white chalks which end up toning down your vivid and dark black weathering chalks for a smoother and more even looking old road!