I've never worked with plaster before. I've read about various ways to create roads and pavement - a styrene sheet, spackling compound, plaster - and after reading some advice in Model Railroader by Pelle Soeborg, I gave plaster a try. Of course, not on the actual layout yet - rather, on a scrap piece of homasote and an old piece of track. I started with the Woodland Scenics paving tape - it's a roll of foam tape with a sticky side, useful for blocking out a space. I used Woodland Scenics' Smooth-It plaster mix for the plaster. For such a small space, I cut the recipe by 75 percent, so I used 1/2 cup of mix and 1/4 cup of water. Let sit for a few minutes, then mix for a few minutes, and pour. It made way more plaster than I needed. They give you a spreader to level off the space, but it was a little tricky to work with. I got things as close as I could, and after 15 minutes I ran an old truck along the rails to make sure it wasn't sticking. That evening I used a screwdriver to carve out along the rails. The package said to give it 24 hours to set, so today it was pretty solid. The surface wasn't as flat as I planned but it's easy to sand. It's also easy to scrape away material from along the rails. I don't know if that affects the conductivity of the rails but I think it won't (these are sidings anyway). Woodland Scenics makes a concrete color and an asphalt color paint for these, so that would be the next step. But this little experiment answered a lot of questions for me.
Lessons learned:
1. I didn't need nearly as much plaster as I thought to fill that small space.
2. Soeborg used some putty to fill in the gaps between the ties. I see why he did that - the plaster settles in there and still shows them through the 'pavement'.
3. I don't have to be too accurate with making sure the wet plaster is level, because sanding it was pretty easy.
4. I was concerned that the wet plaster might not work well with the homasote surface. But I didn't see any issues with that.
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