Adding Ground Cover and Ballasting the Tracks

My three year old son and I made about 50 trees or so for the layout. The trees are made of two parts the branches, and clump folliage. You twist the tree shapes to make the branches the shape that you like, and then cover them with tacky glue. This tacky glue needs to dry for about 15 minutes before applying the ground foam. We had trees sticking to everything, and everyone, but it was a lot of fun. To make things easier, my son and I "planted" the trees into spare Styrofoam, and then sprinkled the foam over.

The next step was more fun, spreading ground foam around the layout. I used a series of different colors from lush grass, to a dead/dying grass color for around steep slopes. After this we planted the trees by drilling holes and gluing them in to place.

I then ballasted the track by spreading buff colored ballast down the rails, cleaning of the tops of the rails. Finally I sprayed the entire layout down with "wet water." Which is water with a few drops of liquid soap added to break surface tension. After wetting down the layout I went back through and sprayed a 50/50 mix of elmer's glue and water to hold everything in place. Here's what it looked like when I finished.