GARDEN RAILWAYS

TRACKWORK                 

The track plan

          The track plan itself was always going to be a continuous run with a single track mainline and passing loops at at least 2 places.  The original planned route wound it's way into every nook and cranny of the garden and had to be amended later when the minimum radius for the main line was set at 6ft-ish as a result of advice.  Even making changes to the route one part of the mainline has to be 5' 9" radius but in goods yards some radii will be Peco set track which I believe is 2' 6".  I bought this set track to rig up on the lawn when we wanted to test a Roundhouse diesel and I'm told that this track-work has a slight widening of the gauge where the radius is reduced to this absolute minimum for us.  

          I did a lot of scribbling on paper but the real fun part was drawing track plans onto the garden with a rake.  A design I kept coming back to had a substantial main station and goods yard on one side of the garden with a simple but longish passing loop on the other side of the garden with winding single track mainline joining them together into a continuous run.  Take a look at the sketch plan to see what we went for.  The main station is 'Crowfoot' while the passing loop station is 'Bramley Bank'. 

          Rather than have the whole garden taken over we went for the idea of having two or three 'scenes' where specific areas of the garden get modelled for the railway and the rest of the garden just has to be sympathetic to the railway and our other uses for the garden.  The Crowfoot station had to be the first and main scene with Bramley Bank and immediate surroundings making up the second.  A third scene, which is being kept for later development, is the area around the pathway where the mainline crosses the path in two places by way of level crossing and under an over-bridge.

The track

          We need an effective and swift method of laying the railway once we get the track base built and secure and this is why we went for Peco SM32 track.  The pity is the range of pointwork available and particularly the lack of a curved point for main running tracks.  My previous experience of Peco tracklaying is their 009 crazy track on a plywood base, which I appreciate is very different to laying SM32 in the garden on bricks set into the ground.  A very big positive with live steam in the garden is that we don't have to concern ourselves with electrical conductivity but we have big negatives like the effect of the extremes of heat and cold on the trackwork.