Grassassinator and the wonders of static electricity

My efforts for getting the short escarpment area continue... slowly.  I'm a bit mixed in thoughts on if I should finish or not.  The Zoning controller has deemed the train room to be re-zoned back to residential use.  In English that means my Wife has decided that I should clean out the garage and move into that so she can have the spare room back.

This presents some great opportunities for me to re-design, and re-build a BETTER, STRONGER, FASTER layout.  but all the work done thus far on the current layout would be trashed.  The cliffs have turned out great so it will hurt somewhat to tear them down, but I'm confident I can redo them again and make them better.  Lessons are being learned !  and in that viewpoint, I'm going to proceed a bit and finish this small section.  But the new train room is beckoning..

So my father built me a fantastic static grass applicator using a $5 dollar ionizer thingy from the internet.  The most expensive part of the build was actually a transformer to make it safe if it didn't ground properly - its electronic talk that went over my head, but amounted to if someone bypassed the grounding pin when plugging it into the wall (or extension cord) it could fry a whole lot of electronics in the house.  So that was $17 well spent I think.  Certainly a far cry from the 200 dollars the Germans want for theirs.  Although, lets face it, theirs is probably pretty cool too.  Not sure if its more powerful though.

Anyway, we tried it out at my nephews birthday party.  Very cool stuff watching the grass stand up.  Feels like fur when the glue dries.   Anyway, here's some shots from my new iPhone 4. The first two shots are kinda artsy and look great, the first with shadows from surrounding things or clouds but then again I'm biased.  The other shots show more of the grass.  The hill is covered in 'vegetation" not grass. It will have trees all over it when its complete, so that will be the forest floor.  I'm going more for a bit of different colour and texture.  I'm going to do some more passes with different coloured grasses to make it thicker and more like a field between the tracks.

My weakness seems to be ballast.  Sure the line that's done is an old line, that's supposed to look kind of crappy and used (with the grass growing in it) but it looks really bad. Maybe it will dry better and I'll be happy.  Or I'll just fix it up as best as I can.  Of course, there's the fact that it will all be destroyed with the new train room move !