Following my Experiment with Felt terrain on Hex Grid, I was unsatisfied with using a grey felt strip for a railway line. So I went looking for a patterned felt that I could use. And I found it: Gingham Printed Hard Craft Felt in Black.
This is all part of my ongoing search for Operational terrain to inform the set of rules I’m thinking about called Deep Battle.
Gingham Printed Hard Craft Felt Sheet comes in, more or less, A4 sheets. And it is hard. I’ve never encountered hard felt before but I like it more than the normal soft stuff for roads and railway lines.
I chopped the felt sheet up with clothing scissors. I cut the strips to they had two lines of check in each “railway line”.
I think the effect on the table is better. Unfortunately, the photo doesn’t really do it justice.
For the sake of comparison I also took a photo of the same table with grey felt railway lines.
Something else I’ve thought of using is the plastic mesh canvas used for making tapestries. It comes in various gauges. I’ve no idea if it would work, but if it did it could give you a perfect railway line effect.
Richard, I’m sure experiments will continue.
But I do recall that somebody told me, and it was probably you, that one of the advantages of using felt for roads, rivers, and railways, was that felt sticks to felt. Doesn’t float around. In contrast things like resin, metal, card, and plastic, on small terrain features, will float around on the table.
That’s especially true for Hexon, but there are ways for anchoring things. My Kriegspiel-style ceramic blocks are particularly slippery, but adding a self-adhesive label to the bottom was enough to fix it.
I had a similar problem with sanded cork tiles in my ‘Crossfiregrad’ layout, so I stuck felt onto the bottom of the buildings.
In this case you could stick the strips of mesh onto felt beds. Somebody needs to try it!
I have found Heroics and Ros / Navwar 1:300 scale railway segments work well. Happy to show you what I have got currently.
Cool. The Heroics and Ros catalogue says they have four railway track pieces:
RRT13 STRAIGHT TRACK
RRT12 CURVED TRACK
RRT21 LEFT HAND POINT/SWITCH
RRT22 RIGHT HAND POINT/SWITCH
Any idea how long a straight is?