The trails and rails can also be made with Photoshop brushes, even without making new ones. The essential control you need for those is called "spacing," and you can find it in the brushes palette in the Brush Tip Shape panel. You can also get a brush to rotate according to the direction of your stroke by setting the Angle Jitter control drop-down to direction. That can be found in the Shape Dynamics panel.

You probably already have some dingbat fonts with appropriate symbols installed. If you're in Windows, you can explore them using the Character Map: Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map. Even normal fonts sometimes have useful symbols. Like so: ۞ ۩ Those are both from Arial.

Now, the difference between the brush tool and the custom shape tool: Brushes are like actual brushes—you can make a continuous stroke with a variety of different dynamics applied to it. Or you can just drop a single "copy," essentially dabbing with the brush. A shape, on the other hand, is a vector object—it can be dragged out to any size without losing sharpness, and stretched or squashed freely. A brush can also have translucent portions, but a shape cannot. In both cases, they inherit the foreground color, so when they are made, you use only black and white, and shades of gray for translucent portions of a brush.