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I've got an interlocking tower and farm that both need some type of dirt road to access them. Woodland scenics makes "dirt" but it's a bit too dark for my liking and I'm not aware of any other manufacturer who makes a similar product. My layout is based on the Milwaukee road D&I division in the fall of the late 60s (if that matters). And while I'm here, what color foliage and grass would be appropriate? I'm thinking lighter greens but any ideas are welcome!
The way I make dirt roads is to find an appropriate color find model railroad ballast or even baked dirt. I paint the road with a thick, undiluted acrylic paint (mix your desired color on an old cookie sheet), then sprinkle the ballast on the wet paint. This usually does it. You probably should experiment with the colors and the ballast. Raw umber, yellow ocre, cadmium yellow, are some possibilities. I use LiquiTex that comes in pint jars. The stuff dries pretty quickly, but slowly enough to work with.
Using real dirt for to model a dirt road seems to be overkill scale wise. Since most of us view our layouts from arms length, go look at a real dirt from 200'-300' You won't see much dirt & it should look real smooth.
I am also considering putting in a small dirt access road to my rail station. The idea of using real dirt is a great idea. Getting it fine enough should be easy enough if it is rolled (after being baked) into virtually a powder. The problem then is how to "fix it" to the layout without turning it into mud?
Using ballast is another good idea as well. That too could be crushed into smaller sizes and left sit in an appropriate diluted color paint to achieve a closer dirt color for your area. Need less to say, once colored, it would have to be crushed again. Using crushed ballast would possibly eliminate creating a mud look too.
Have seen way to many closeup pix of dirt roads on layouts that like it was made using small boulders & not dirt. You'd be
better off just using plaster to model the dirt.
If you want to use real dirt for the roads you can use a sifter and get down to the smaller particles of the dirt so it will not look so out of scale. I used a screen type grease separator from the kitchen utensil section at Walmart. It has a very fine screen and the dirt will come out super fine almost dust and looks very good on the layout. Putting it down is just like putting down turf. A layer of 50/50 glue/water and a few drops of dish soap. Spread it in a thin even layer. Don't touch it at all. Let it dry completely and brush off excess and your done.
Arizona Rock & Mineral sells an "Earth" product that is the consistency of extremely fine sand.
Yes, the particles are "out of scale" on an HO or N-scale layout, but the same is true for many scenery materials. At smaller scales, the best we can hope to do with our scenery is to create an illusion of reality, not a scale model of reality.
So while flat, brown latex paint is more "to scale" than real dirt or the AR&M "Earth," the paint does not have the illusion of reality. It looks like, well, paint!
Dirt... how about going outside? There is a vacant lot across that has a 20 year supply for Woodland Scenics, and nobody cares. Lotsa colors and shades. Be sure to bake it at 400 degrees for a half hour to sterilize the soil and start laying out your road. Remember the wheel ruts too. There are dirt "roads" around here you dont need to steer in the ruts are so deep.
Here is a picture of the finely sifted sand I got when I used the fine screen grease separator. The sand is masonry sand that I sifted with 3 different screens and have 3 sizes now. The parking lot is the finest and laid as I explained above.
Woodland Scenics has a bag of fall foliage-a nice mix of reds, oranges, browns and yellows for fall foliage. I model the fall, so I've used a mix of various shades of green that haven't turned colors yet and then various fall colors to a few bare trees. I've been looking around for another manufacturer or two of fall colors just to get some different variety to the fall colors. So far, no luck-I haven't liked what I have seen so far.
This got me thinking, so I tried the "real dirt" approach to see how it would look. This is how it turned out:
There are a couple of things I like about using real dirt, or at least how this turned out. The first is it didn't dry all the same color, which tends to give it a more natural look, even if the photo doesn't show it all that well. While there are still some "larger" grains in it, those grains look like stones or gravel, as would be seen on a dirt road or parking area and, finally, it is cheap to get
The dirt is the darker brown by the way, the rest is turf etc.
While it may not be exactly to scale, I personally think it works well if you have the time to prepare it. What I used was only sifted through window mesh a few times too. Had I used stockings or similar, t would have been much finer.
