Roads? - Where We're Going...We're Gonna Need Roads

The Road (More or) Less Travelled

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I­ – I took the road less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.”

How did the battle of Shiloh save MGM Pictures? Roads.

I was asked back in 2014 by the editor of "ACW Gamer Ezine" to write a few articles on my 6mm ACW setup. Both regarding painting 6mm minis and scratch-building 6mm terrain. I mainly game and model ACW in 6mm scale, due to a shrinking amount of space at home on which to actually play. My playing space is also, not permanently set up. I therefore often have to clear the gaming table if something annoying happens like someone wanting to use the dining table for…well…dining.

My 6mm set-up with scratch-built everything - except some £3 buildings from Total Battle Miniatures

Thus, for the most part – my terrain has to be easily portable, storable and flexible and therefore mainly scratch built. So here's a quick tutorial on a way to make a cheap, flexible road system that looks good and can be set up in a variety of configurations. The advantage with these types of road over rigid types is that these will follow the contours of your hills and valleys due to flexibility of the caulk and the material.

There’s no reason why this can’t work at any scale, you just simply scale it up to suit you and your base sizes for 10mm; 15mm or 28mm games. I can’t lay claim to inventing this method; I suspect it has been around for years, but I do believe I have got this working pretty well - through making some time-consuming (though thankfully not expensive) errors.

The things you will need:

• A tube of decorators’ caulk and a metal caulk gun  - the caulk will need to be of a type that can be painted over (it should say so clearly on the tube). Both the caulk and the gun can be picked up in hardware stores and are not expensive. I the UK I picked up the caulk for £1.99 and the  gun for £1.49 from Wilko.
• An old T-shirt (or a cheap new one)
• A good pair of scissors (preferably dress-making scissors that will easily cut material
• A Sharpie or similar permanent marker that will draw onto material
• Something to spread the caulk thinly, a large palette knife if you have one but a scrap square piece of plasticard works just as well
• A modelling sculpting tool, or something to make wheel marks and ruts with if you don’t have one. I suspect a knitting needle would make a good substitute.
• Masking tape
• Tracing paper or baking parchment (not essential but can be useful)
• Modelling paints and a couple of large brushes (I’m assuming you will already have these)
• Flock to finish (and I’m assuming you have this too)

Securing a Suitable Garment

I’m sure the vast majority of us have a T-shirt or two lurking in the closet that we are slowly coming to realise that we are not going to slim back into. I’ve found that a plain dark(ish) colour is best (gray, brown, black) and also something not too thick. If you don’t have something suitable, then I’d suggest you head to a local store and buy the cheapest (and largest – XXXL costs the same as M right?) brown or grey T-shirt you can. In the UK that means Primark. I'm sure that whatever part of the world you live in you have an equivalent. Charity shops are obviously good for this too.

When you get your t-shirt home from the violent scrum of Primark, cut it in half down the side-seams so that you have two sheets of material, one from the front and one from the back. If you’re really resourceful you can even use the sleeves, but I tend to have a regular supply of old t-shirts as there is something in the London water that seems to make garments shrink around the stomach area.

Planning

Once you have your t-shirt material, the next thing to do is decide on the width of your roads. Two things to consider with this are: “what is the frontage of my stands?” and “how wide are the roads across my bridges?”

I base my 6mm Adlers on 15mm square stands, usually 4-6 infantry figures on each. And the inner road width of my bridges is approximately 20mm. I therefore decided that 20mm was a nice round number for the width of my roads as this would leave a couple of millimetres either side of my columns and would fit nicely with my bridges (having a road that is visibly wider or much narrower than a bridge that it leads to just looks funny). 

I know a lot of people base 6mm figures on 30mm x 60mm stands representing a whole brigade or regiment, in this case, just make your roads a standard width that you are happy with that fits with your buildings and bridges. The 20mm width also has the advantage that it fits in with the frontage of a Warmaster unit in column. As I play a bit of Warmaster it helps that I can use my 6mm scenery for this too, I just have to change the buildings.

Once you are happy with the width, think about the type of roads you are after. Do you want to make a series of straights, bends and junctions that you may find on roads that can be bought commercially? Or do you want to make the roads for a specific battle? In this instance I am making a few specific pieces of road I need, as I already have a number of road sections made up and painted. I drew shapes of the roads and junctions I required onto tracing paper, so that I could transfer the shapes onto the t-shirt.

You will need a flat surface such as a table to attach the material to. The t-shirt needs to be stretched out flat and secured to the table with strong tape. Make sure it is as flat as possible and has as few creases as possible.

You may want to freehand the road shapes straight onto the t-shirt, but as I mentioned above – I am making some specific junctions I need and have already drawn the shapes onto tracing paper. I therefore used some tape to attach the tracing paper to the the t-shirt. I'm using low-tac Tamiya masking tape here.

Using a modelling knife with a new blade I made some small incisions in the tracing paper to allow me to push the sharpie through the tracing paper to make marks to guide me in drawing the road shapes. With some planning you can maximise the amount of roads you can fit in on your material.

Once the road shapes were transferred onto the t-shirt, I removed the tracing paper and masked out the edges of the roads with more masking tape. You can skip marking out the roads if you which and completely freehand the whole thing but this method suits me best. This can take some time, especially when masking curved sections and some of the junctions, but for me it’s worth taking a little time over.

Once everything is masked, use the caulk gun to spread a thin amount of caulk into your masked shapes. Using your palette knife or scrap of plasticard, spread the caulk thinly onto the material making sure it goes right to the edge of your masking. 

While the caulk is still wet, use a sculpting tool to etch in some ruts and wheelmarks into the roads.

You will need to leave the caulk to dry, I usually leave it overnight but you will need to refer to the instructions on the tube as to how long it needs.

When the caulk is totally dry, hold the t-shirt down with one hand and tear off the masking tape with the other. If you have spread your caulk too thickly this can be tricky, but once you have peeled off the masking you should just be left with your road shapes on the t-shirt. Using scissors, cut around your road shapes, dress making scissors are best here as you need to cut through the t-shirt material as easily as possible.

Sometimes just tearing off the masking tape works, sometimes you need the help of a pair of scissors

Painting

The choice of your road colour will be a mixture of personal choice and of course depend on what theatre of the war you are trying to replicate (I believe for instance that the dirt roads in parts of Georgia are of red clay). As I am painting my roads a light brown colour, I use Humbrol matt spray (Dark Brown – 29) to undercoat the roads. 

I use a large brush to drybrush two further tones on the road, firstly Citadel Baneblade Brown*...

 

...and finally with Rakarth Flesh*. With both layers I mix in Tamiya matt medium as I find the Citadel colours dry with a slight sheen to them.

Finishing off

I find that roads look best with a bit of flock on the edges and the odd patch in the centre of the roads. Don’t overdo this but use the side of the brush to apply some PVA glue to the edges of the road and press the road into a container of flock. Because of the length of some of the stretches of road, I use an old baking tray with sides about an inch high to hold the flock. Mrs Street loves it when I do this in the kitchen and leave little bits of static grass everywhere.

And that's about it, the roads are finished and ready for your columns to march on for many a year!

A grumpy Confederate Corps Commander encourages his reserves forward as I naturally roll x3 "Tardy" results in a row.

Union and Rebel cavalry about to mix it, not even having the decency to use the road I've made them

For those of you still wondering how a road at Shiloh saved MGM pictures, in his essay Ghosts of the Shunpike for the book What If? – America, author Victor Davis Hanson suggests what might – or rather what might not - have been, had Lew Wallace chosen the river road instead of the Shunpike at Shiloh. Hanson argues that without the haunting shadow of being the scapegoat for Shiloh’s high casualties, the book Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ would probably never have been written. This opinion views Ben-Hur as an embodiment of Wallace’s obsessive sense of injustice and a direct confrontation of Wallace’s demons through literature.

Ben-Hur: brought Lew Wallace fame and immense fortune. The book turned out to be not only one of the most popular American novels of all time, but also one of the most important.  It was the best-selling American novel of the 19^th Century, selling more copies than Uncle Tom’s Cabin and for many ordinary Americans Wallace's time it became the first – and only – book they ever read apart from the bible. In that regard at least the book marked a radical change, as millions of Americans felt for the first time that reading fiction was neither sacrilegious nor the sole esoteric pursuit of intellectuals. The last of four movie adaptations saved MGM from financial disaster, and although he would not have known it in his lifetime – it turned out Wallace may have introduced more Americans to reading than any other author in the 19^th Century. Things could have been so different if he had chosen a different road.

*Note - this piece was originally committed to print in 2014 and as such the Citadel paint names have changed. You'll need to use a paint conversion chart to work out what the new names are - or obviously just use colours from your favourite range. I know a lot of people prefer to use the cheapest of the cheap hobby paints  or from the hardware store when making scenic items. Whatever works for you.