One night I was sitting waiting for glue to dry on my layout, and I spotted a good size space between my tracks that really could have used a hill, now since I was out of foam I began to think of other materials around the house that I could use to form a nice hill.
When I’m not the Mayor of my HO town I work as an EMT in my real life, so of course my mind began to go through a check list of what we use on the job first, I considered gauze wrap but didn’t have any plaster left.
I then began to play with the idea of using some old splinting material called “Sam splints” for those of you who are not familiar with this material it is a thin sheet of bendable aluminum with about 1/16th thickness of foam rubber on both sides.
We form these long 6"X 36" sandwiched materials to act as a splint by doubling this material in half and rolling up the end to form a splint for the fore arm, the excess that is rolled up and fits in the patients hand and the rest runs up the underside of the forearm and then is wrapped to the arm with cling wrap to form a custom splint made to order.
This material is strong enough to keep the arm from moving but light enough that it can be formed by hand as the EMT needs.
I grabbed a few old ones that I had from EMT school some 4 years ago and began bending it into a long hill after cutting the length I needed to fit between the tracks, this created a sturdy foam covered hill that is about 3" in height and a foot long and hot glued the edges to my layout.
Next I painted the foam surface with a mud colored acrylic paint to serve as a background color, from there I applied a skin of light weight concrete patch to give it a gritty texture.
Then when that skim coat set up I used formed blobs of the stuff to create boulders jetting out of the surface (this light weight patch sets up in minutes) from here I brushed on the white glue, sprinkled the grass onto the areas but leaving the boulders exposed now all I have to do is