Tutorial: Create a Rail Track

Creatng a Rail Track

The rail track  is rather hard to create without brushes or effects for those who are not familiar with Illustrator’s secrets. The tricky part lies in the double line of the rails. Here this pictorial description shows how to make it with multiple strokes only.

Step 1
At first draw a line (\). Let’s first make a basic shape of the rail track. Give your line a medium brown stroke color (I used #a67c52 – anyway, we’ll replace it with texture later) and assign it a width of 100 pt. Now go to the Stroke palette and make it dashed with 10 pt stroke and a 10 pt gap. Okay, so these are our future wooden sleepers (which is a rectangular object used as a base for railroad tracks, also called cross ties).

Step 1: Drawing the Outline

Step 2
Now we need to make the rails. With the line selected, go to the Appearance palette and add a new stroke. Give it gray color (#4d4d4d or K=70%), make it 60 pt wide and uncheck Dashed in stroke palette. This will be our rails. I know, it looks bad now, but be patient and move to next step.

Step 2: Creating the Rails

Step 3
To actually make the rails, add another stroke to the line. Make it pink (or any other vivid color) and 40 pt wide. It should be on top. This stroke will serve as a kind of mask in the Appearance palette, and it won’t be visible. I only made it pink to quickly choose it later in the Appearance panel.

Step 3: Adding another Stroke

Step 4
Here comes the tricky part. Make sure the pink stroke is selected (it has to be after the previous step) and go right to the Opacity palette (or press Shift + Command + F10) and reduce its Opacity to 0%.

Now go back to Appearance panel and select the top-most line that says Path. And now return to the Opacity panel and click twice on the Knockout Group option so that it’s checked. Ta-da! The rails are ready! The pink stroke is a mask now knocking out all strokes below. Now you can put this rail track on any background and it will show through!

Step 5: Making the Inner parts

Step 5
Unfortunately, the mask knocked out our sleepers as well, so we need to add them above. Duplicate the bottom brown stroke, drag it on top of the stack and change its width to 40 pt. For now you’ll have 4 strokes in the Appearance panel: brown 100 pt (bottom sleepers), gray 60 pt (rails), pink 40 pt (mask), and brown 40 pt (top sleepers). Congratulations, the basic rail track shape is ready!

Step 5: Making the Sleepers

Step 6
Now we’ll add some realistic details. Let’s improve our sleepers first. Select the bottom brown stroke of the rail track and duplicate it. Now select the bottom one of the same two strokes and change their color to dark brown (#42210b). Now change it’s width to 102 pt.

Finally, go to the Stroke palette and change the values of the dashed line to 11 stroke and 9 gap. Now all you have to do is make a copy of this stroke and drag it 3 strokes above to position it under your top sleepers. Of course, change it’s width to 40 pt.

Step 6: Add Details to the Sleepers

Step 7
The rails lack realism as well, so let’s select the gray stroke in the middle of the Appearance stack and duplicate it (the copy appears above). Change it’s color to a darker gray (#333333 or K=80%) and make it 44 pt wide. This is the inner side of the rails. Duplicate it to make the outer side and drag it below the main rail stroke. Change its width to 64 pt. Now you have 8 strokes.

Step 7: Make the rails more realistic

Step 8
This step is unnecessary, but you can do it to add one more detail – the joined rails. Duplicate the basic rail stroke (the gray one with 60 pt width). Give it a darker gray color (#1a1a1a or K90%) and make it dashed in the Stroke palette with a 1 pt stroke and 200 pt gap.

To add joint bars that fix rails, duplicate the new stroke and drag it below the main rail stroke (2 stokes down). Make it 68 pt wide and change the order of dashes to 11 stroke and 190 gap. The idea is to keep both newly created strokes together, so the sum in their stroke/gap numbers must be equal (1+200 = 11+190). This way rail joints and joint bars have the same position.

Step 8: Join the Slepperes

Step 9
OK, for now you’ll have 10 strokes, and that’s enough for our rail track. The only thing we need now is wood grain for the sleepers. Unfortunately, there are no default wood patterns in Illustrator, but we’ll find it anyway.

You can use any method of creating wood patterns, but I’ll tell you the easiest way. Go to Window > Brush Libraries > Border > Borders_Frames and open the brushes library. There are a few wood brushes here that might suit our sleepers.

Grab the Oak brush and drag it into your document (make sure no shape is selected, otherwise the brush will be applied to it). The group of shapes will appear – select it and press Shift + Command + G to ungroup. Now delete the corner part of the brush – and you end up with a simple wooden texture. Rotate the wooden group by 90 degrees (I just like it better this way) and drag it into your swatches palette. Double-click the new swatch and name it “Wood.”

Step 9: Applying wooden Patterns

Step 10
All you have to do now is select the rail track and replace the light brown strokes in the Appearance panel with the new wooden pattern. Select the stroke of the sleepers (second from bottom 100 pt) and click “Wood” in the Swatches panel. Do the same with the top-most stroke of 40 pt width. Well, your rail track is ready, and you can save it as a graphic style and apply it to any curve now!

Step 10: Applying the wooden textures

– Courtesy: Vector Tuts