Rusty/rickety track

[Intercity]

I tried searching for this but came up blank, those of you that have built layouts how did you go about modeling goods sidings, stub tracks, unused sidings with regard to them not being up to mainline standards?

Usually the sleepers are broken and have moved around from their original spacing, rails are more often than not rusty, oil spills in various places where stock and locos have been standing, and also the rails themselves are often warped/rickety and generally "stick" rail (not continuous weld).

Any help and advice appreciated.

Btw if it's possible to do these things it would be in peco code 55 rail.

[AndyRA]

One way is to ballast the track with a mixture of darker colours, brown and black, with a bit of grey, and bit of green scatter mixed in to represent some weeds. A few code 80 sleepers cut individually and laid out to represent lifted sidings.
Plus a few blobs of glue and some static grass to have some more established weeds.
To give the sleepers a bit of a distressed look paint them with a slightly dilute matt light grey.



Less weedy looking the closer you get to the main line, as the Weed Killing Train will have sprayed outwards towards the sidings. If it's completely disused paint the top of the rails as well as the sides. I went for a brick/brown colour for the more lightly used sidings.



After a bit more static grass was added





All the track I used was Code 55.

Andy.

[Newportnobby]

Andy has shown all the methods I'd use apart from maybe a rusted out wagon sat in a siding.
I think the type of track doesn't really matter as they can all be made to look derelict.

[ozzie Bill.]

I agree with Andy and NPN. The other thing I did was to roughly lay some track, some ballast and paint etc, then remove the track, so there was a "ripped up" effect. Sadly, the whole layout was ripped up in real life, so I have no pix, but is was very effective to represent the whole Beeching effect! Left a few used sleepers and odd lengths of track laying around afterwards for the final effect.