Laying The Turf

Here is an update on the progress of laying down the grass around Cliddesden Station and surrounding area. As mentioned previously the turf is being applied using static grass, this produces a more authentic look. As our model has a lot of turf to lay, it's taking a little longer than other methods. In the end though it's going to look amazing - I'm sure you'll agree...

On the back fill behind the station building we used a mixture of spring and meadow grass from Noch, however we soon realised it was not going to be the right colour for the rest of the layout. As we are trying to model the prototype in the summer, we had to find some "summer grass" and different shades of burnt grass, in 3 different sizes, 2mm, 4mm and 6mm. So a search online revealed war-world.co.uk we found them via ebay, and quickly ordered up 20grams of each size. We first of all laid the bank in front of the platform, starting with 4mm and gradually working upto 6mm by the time we past the end of the platform. This took 5 hours in all just to do that bit, although it looked impressive the block of grass was a little unnatural, we had to find away to break it up  bit. As we are modelling a summer scene we felt it was missing some long straw coloured 'dried' grass. War-Worlds unfortunately, don't do long straw like grass. Luckily a visit to a local model railway exhibition sorted that problem. We sprayed some diluted PVA on top of the summer grass and added it in, not sure whether it would work, but were surprised by the great end result. On the bank behind the station we added it in with the summer grass as we went a long, this provided more densely packed 'dried' grass areas. The pictures below give you an overview as to how far we have got, and the different shadings involved. If you look closely you can make out some grass paths and a cricket pitch.

There's still a lot more to grass, but it's beginning to pull the model together. 

Ed