Part 1: Road
Open a new document (Command + N) and make it 1000px by 600 px.
Step 1
Make a straight line (\) and save it. Apply it to any other path later.
We are going to use multiple strokes for the road. Create a line with no fill and a 100 pt wide stroke. Give it a medium colour. This will be the main road width.
Step 2
To make the road border, choose the line and navigate to the Appearance panel (Shift + F6). Choose the stroke and drag it to the New button (or choose Add New Stroke in the flyout menu). The new stroke will appear on top and it will be selected. Change its colour and width to 112 pt. Finally, drag the new stroke below the first one.
Step 3
Make a markup. Select the road and add a new stroke in the Appearance panel. Change its colour and give it 10 pt width. Navigate to the stroke palette and check Dashed Line. Make the stroke 80 pt with a gap of 20 pt. Base of the road is ready.
Step 4
Choose the line and navigate to the Appearance panel. Add a new stroke. Make it 116 pt wide, add a colour, uncheck the Dashed option and drag it to the bottom of the stack. This stroke is the outer side of the road border.
Step 5
There are four strokes in the road’s Appearance panel now. For the inner side of the border, select the stroke which is 112 pt wide (second from the bottom) and drag it to a New button. Give the new stroke a darker colour and 104 pt width.
Step 6
Choose the road and navigate to Appearance panel. Select the main gray 100 pt stroke (it is the second from the top) and add new stroke. Do not change its width. Choose the new stroke and go to menu Window > Swatches Library > Patterns > Basic Graphic > Texture. From the pattern library, choose any irregular texture. If the effect looks too harsh, navigate to the Opacity panel and reduce the stroke Opacity to 15%.
Step 7
Choose the road and change the top-most markup stroke’s blending mode to Overlay so that the texture shows through (or reduce its Opacity). Now you have 6 strokes.
Step 8
Make your own pattern with irregular texture and replace the stroke by going to Raster Effect of Texture > Grain. Then expand, ungroup, live trace and save it in swatches panel. Then choose the road texture stroke and pick a new pattern swatch. Adjust the new pattern’s stroke opacity (I made it 30%)
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Save the resulted effect as a graphic style and apply it to any path. You can create a new curvy road with the Pen Tool (P), Ellipse Tool (L), or any other shape or path.
Part 2: Rail Track
The tricky part in creating a rail track lies in the double line of the rails. Let me show you how to make it with multiple strokes.
Step 1
Draw a line (\) and give the line a medium brown stroke colour. Assign it a width of 100 pt. Navigate to the Stroke palette and make it dashed with 10 pt stroke and a 10 pt gap.
Step 2
Select the lines and navigate to the Appearance palette and add a new stroke. Give it a colour, make it 60 pt wide and uncheck Dashed in stroke palette. This will be our rails.
Step 3
To make the rails, add another stroke to the line. Give it any other vivid colour and 40 pt wide. Place it on top. This stroke will serve as a mask in the Appearance palette, and it won’t be visible.
Step 4
Select the new stroke and go right to the Opacity palette (or press Shift + Command + F10) and reduce its Opacity to 0%.
Then go back to Appearance panel and choose 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. The rails are ready!
Note: To fix the ends of the line, change the stroke’s cap style to Rounded the in Stroke panel.
Step 5
The mask has knocked out the sleepers. 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. Now you’ll have 4 strokes in the Appearance panel. The basic rail track shape is ready!
Step 6
To add some realistic details, choose the bottom brown stroke of the rail track and duplicate it. Now select the bottom one of the same two strokes and change their colour. Change it’s width to 102 pt.
Finally, go to the Stroke palette and change the values of the dashed line to 11 strokes and 9 gaps. Make a copy of this stroke and drag it 3 strokes above to position it under your top sleepers. Change it’s width to 40 pt.
Step 7
Choose the grey stroke in the middle of the Appearance stack and duplicate it. Change its colour 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 8
Duplicate the basic rail stroke. Give it a darker colour 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 strokes and 190 gaps. 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 9
You have 10 strokes. Now what we need is wood grain for the sleepers.
To create wood patterns, navigate to Window > Brush Libraries > Border > Borders_ Frames and open the brushes library. There are a few wood brushes here that might suit the sleepers.
Grab the Oak brush and drag it into the 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. Rotate the wooden group by 90 degrees and drag it into the swatches palette. Double-click the new swatch and name it “Wood.”
Step 10
Choose the rail track and replace the light brown strokes in the Appearance panel with the new wooden pattern. Pick 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. Save it as a graphic style and apply it to any curve.
Step 11
Now you have 10 strokes for the rail track and 6 strokes for the road. We used 100 pt strokes for width. Still you can scale current effects if you check Transform Strokes and Effects in the flyout menu of the Transform palette (Shift + F8). Save these stroke combinations as graphic styles to re-apply them later to any path.
In this tutorial we made a multi-layered effect of road and rail track using predominately the Appearance palette in Adobe Illustrator. To achieve it we used multiple strokes of different width, colour, and type. We also exploited the knockout effect of the opacity panel for masking. Objects created with this technique can easily be edited, as the result consists of one path.
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