T-trak Scenery Work

Here's a track-level shot of a P42 at the Empire tunnel portal:

I received the Scenic Express "Pennsy" double track portals for the Virginia Avenue end of this tunnel. I had to hack away at one of them pretty severely to get Superliners and Chicago style bi-levels through:

Once I get it painted and weathered with scenery brought around it, this should be less visible.

Then I turned to landforms at the other end of the layout. I followed the inspiration of YouTuber Roy Smith and used white foam shaped with Dragon Skin abrasive material and then covered with spackle:

Then I gave it a base coat of earth-colored craft paint. I find this for a little over a buck a bottle at Michaels. (The paper rectangle in the photo is to size a structure kit I'm planning to add there.)

However, I wanted to provide a dirt type scenic base on which I will eventually add trees and other shrubbery. In the past, I've used sifted dirt for this, but I'm out of sifted dirt. I thought I'd try another experiment. I remembered a friend who told me that the way to make European style coffee in the US is to get ordinary US coffee and put it through a coffee grinder a second time. So I decided I'd see what happened if I ran coffee grounds through a coffee grinder -- could I get something like scale dirt?

I gave it a try. Actually, it didn't make the coffee grounds much finer. (I'm not sure how my friend's idea would work for getting European coffee this way, either.) But it was a slight improvement:

I brushed white glue over the landforms and then sprinkled the coffee grounds on top. Then I followed up with Woodland Scenics extra-fine turf in Burnt Grass and Blended colors. Then I misted water from a garden sprayer over everything to get the white glue to soak in without disturbing the grass or coffee grounds:

The scenery smells like coffee when it's first wet, but once it dries out, the smell goes away. Or so I think. Maybe I just get used to it! Below is a train in the new scenery:

I need to finish installing decoders and other hardware below the surfaces of these modules before I add trees. I'll be using NCE Illuminators, DCC versions of the Just Plug light hub, on nearly all of my modules, so I need to finish this work so I don't have to turn the modules over after I've added delicate features like trees to the tops. Other hardware, like terminal strips and stationary decoders for switches, is already installed.