Working with Scatter - Craig Style

This afternoon I had the privilege to see Craig from Cassino fame do some scenery work.
A few weeks back I saw first hand how Craig made undulating ground forms using tissue and a plaster mix.
Today, it was scenery work.  I took some notes on how he does it and here it is.

1.  Damp the plastered area using a spray bottle.  (note preferable the plaster should be painted some dark colour such as umber).
2.  Spray your glue mix on intended location.  The mix should be 9 parts water to 1 part of PVA, with a drop or two of detergent.
3.  Sprinkle a dirt onto location, which could be obtained from a real location of bought from a producer such as Woodland Scenics
4.  Spray with water
5.  Add a dark soil dirt and spray again.
6.  Now sprinkle some scatter material such as Fine Turf Burnt Grass (T44). Craig uses very thin scatter.
7.  Now spray water followed by the glue mix to hold it all down.
8.  Repeat from beginning to other areas on layout

Some of the materials used were

• Fine Turf Soil from Woodland Scenics (T41)
• Fine Turf Weeds (T46)
• Fine Turf Burnt Grass (T44)
• Fine Turf Earth (T42)

The scene came to life in a matter of minutes.  I hope to do the same on my layout.

Here are some photos which try to demonstrate the sequence of events.

NCE EPROM v1.65 update

At last I got my EPROM Chip directly from NCE.  Larry was very helpful although it took ages to get through the US postal service.  One of the biggest attractions to upgrade to the latest version was the six function recalls.   It is really handy to simply toggle through the recall button to bring up a loco rather than keep typing in the loco numbers.  You can now customise the number of recalls as well, so if you don't like having to cycle through five times to get to a particular loco, you don't have to.  Having to hit the recall button five times if the loco is at the end of the array or queue does need some time to get used to.
The replacement took about five minutes and the instructions to do this comes with the new chip.

The biggest chip in the NCE powercab is the EPROM.

The old EPROM

The new EPROM

To change the number of recalls

Six recalls selected

Time for some videos

Here are some videos of various movements on the layout.  Hope you like them