What's the most unusual/unique material/item you've used in building your layout?

Wouldn’t that also make them great for old metal garbage cans? Just paint em silver [;)]

I used fire for a disaster sceen on the layout but I had to replace the layout afterwards (just kidding)

Well first I need to make sure I have “prior art”, before MTH tries to patent it and sue me…

Many years ago I used flashcubes painted grey as a load on a flatcar. (for you younger guys a flashcube was a small ~ 1" cube holding 4 flash bulbs that rotated on top of the camera so the bottom had a plastic turning mechanism that when painted and turned upside down looked pretty good - at least to my then 15 year old eyes)

Cliff

Some very thin flat wood coffee stir sticks make great lumber stacks glued together and bundled. They also work well for scratch-building clap-board sided houses. .177cal. airgun pellets(flat head and field point pellets) make neat looking rooftop vents for some buildings and factories. I also use that gray/white paperboard (you get in new packages of socks and shirts) to build HO scale buildings with.

I used some fancy round toothpicks for guard rails along side a road. The ones I used had two grooves at the top spaced about 1/16" apart. I used some grey thread that I coated with white glue so it wouldn’t get fuzzy as cables between the guard posts. I just wrapped the thread around the grooves, went to the next one did the same and kept going until I reached the end.

Ed Schultz

I used to cut up the shafts of ice hockey sticks (once the blade broke and they were no longer useful) for risers, etc. Alas, I don’t play anymore so I lost my source.