Category: Planning
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More Steam
Oops. I seem to have bought another live steam locomotive. I really wasn’t intending to.
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One Year On
It’s (just over) a year since I started work on Phase 1 so I thought I’d revisit my site survey photos in a ‘then and now’ fashion
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Hello, Millie
She’s here!
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The Candidates in Steam
Some readers have been a bit reticent to give their opinions on my shortlist of live steam locos! I realised my rather dry summary of the specs might not be enough – I needed to see the locos in action and so do you. Fortunately, there are some rather good videos out there. Please, watch them,…
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The Steam Dream
After a summer of trains pottering round my little circuit of track, and tinkering with rolling stock kits, the prognosis is fairly clear: I have the garden railway bug, and it does not appear to be curable. I need a live steam loco.
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The Eastern Ledge
The track will run in front of a dry wall made of old red sandstone – but at this point it is about 200mm above lawn level. I needed to build up a base for it – and, because I like the look of this rough and crumbling wall, I decided to build a low…
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Trackbed and Badgers
I’m worried about badgers. Sure, lay track on soil or turf, and you’ll soon have problems even without any wildlife becoming involved. A couple of rainy or frosty nights later your trains will be rolling up and down newly emergent humps and hillocks. But badgers could really exacerbate the problem. I read plenty of advice…
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New Territory
The story so far… At the end of my gripping previous post on where to build my railway – I ended on a cliffhanger. Two possible locations, both suffering the limitations of my narrow, steep, garden. Which would I choose?
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Purpose
At one level, planning the course of a garden railway is simply a question of: “how would I like to lay out my train set?” But for an involving, operationally interesting and authentic railway, it’s worth thinking a bit about what the purpose of the line will be.
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Location, Location, Location
Having decided to build a garden railway, I just needed to make the simple decision: where to put it. (Apologies in advance for the cliffhanger ending tot his post…But it was almost 2 years before I cut the first sod.) My garden is long and thin; excellent for a railway if it weren’t for the…