Thank you for your quick reply Jean.
I apologise for a badly worded question, it was late here when I wrote it.
The thing is, some time ago simonu kindly supplied me with several prepared roads, 256 bmp tiles with four seperate trails. I am applying these now to my project with great success, but I was thinking to increase the variety by creating new ones myself without imposing on simonu. I was thinking, 'how hard could it be?' lol
So far my efforts have resulted in the dreaded 'large blocks of colour'. I have copied the bmp files to the relevant places, Textures, scenedb/world/textures and to my project file texture folder. It might be my masked files are faulty but I recall from MaskRider's tute with his airfields there was a certain trick to make masked graphics work in CFS2. I have not found his his tute among my cd collection yet but I have a feeling his solution might only be applicable to large projects rather than a single file.
I'll keep trying until I crack then I guess I'll ask simonu. Thanks for your time.