There are many places where you can find track with some coming from a plethora of third-party sites. These are the older-style, non-automatic points and no frogs, though you can place frog assets on the track if you want to. For a third-party site that offers decent-looking US type track, Visit Jointed Rail for track, and check out the ST-series track by Simulatortrain, or their JR-series track. If you get their American Intermodal add-on, that comes with some nice Norfolk Southern "NS" track in three various grades that have a nice texture and track. With all of these, they come with accompanying ballast textures too.
www.jointedrail.com
For other track, there is also check the Download Station. There is some really, really, nice looking track from Eastern Europe. This series begins with TSM. This too has corresponding textures to match. Being Eastern European, Ukraine possibly, it will be made to the Russian broad gauge of 1530mm instead of the standard gauge 1480mm. Visually it's a tiny bit wider and not as noticeable as you'd think. I use the rusty tracks occasionally for sidings and backwoods lines, and the track with sandy ballast for some sand pits and quarries.
Also on the Download Station is track that begins with SAM. User samplaire has create a series of various tracks with all kinds of ballast. Even though this is Polish and German style track, it is quite suitable for our needs, especially if you are building a transit line. His track normally has the bolt-down rail, which is common on our light rail and subway systems today, however, his has a no-screw series which looks as though it has tie plates and spikes instead like our track, which is quite suitable for mainline operation. It's a bit older, and also in the older style like the others I have mentioned, but it works well. In particular I find his rusty track very, very useful for sidings as the ballast has nice detail. Speaking of ballast, he too has created matching ballast textures. There are some variations on this track by a few users. Among these people I recommend the track by MSGSAPPER. This begins its series with SAP.
Roads....
There are so many roads. I have a preference for four different kinds. The first is a series of US-style roads by an old user Charlie Whitedog (cwhitedog). His roads have a nice edge to them and really look nice. The other, and its variations on a them begin with YARN and YARNnish. These roads are thick so they don't float above the terrain and have nice textures. There are many different styles in the series, including bridges, and static intersections, though there seems to be an issue with some of these. The older YARN roads tend to have slower traffic, and the Yarnnish series tend to have faster traffic and a series of freeways, both narrow 2-lane and 3-lane varieties. Dave Snow (davesnow) has created some nice modifications of these to suit his needs and has made them available. These have various other textures than the default. I too have done the same myself, though for my own use, where I found a gravel texture and used that on the roads. I've also created other customized track where edited the config.txt files and removed traffic to create quiet residential streets, and for use in industrial areas where I want to run rails through the pavement. One of the advantages of the thick YARN-style roads is when track is laid through it, the track isn't buried completely by the road. With some of the older roads, they float too high, which buries the track and requires a lot of fiddling to get the road to look right with the track in it. With the thick track, I simply put down whatever track I want to use, then put the road on top of it. The rails stick up just enough to look like rails in the road, which is so common in cities and in industrial areas.
The other series, which I use occasionally is by George Fisher. His AASHTO-series roads are a bit dated now compared to the others, but they still serve their purpose well. His bridges are really, really nice and his highways, along with his bridges, have found their way on to my routes.
What is good about all of this, whether track or roads, is all can be mixed and matched and used as needed. The SAP-series track has a nice rusty, dark ballast type in it. I've used this with grass-covering to depict an old Grainger branch running across the Prairie, or for sidings around an industrial park, while using one of the rusty SAM tracks in a yard along with the nice NS-series track by Jointed Rail.
As I said there are so many kinds of track and roads, finding what you like, and serves you well can take a bit of trial and error. The good news is if you don't like what you've used in either case, the assets can be easily change out with a few mouse clicks by using the replace asset tool within Surveyor.
John
