The K-Zone: A G-scale garden railway: building the trackbed

Note: Since I recently moved house, work on this railway, and these pages, has ceased. I am currently working on a new G-scale railway, taking into account what I learned from this one.

The first stage in construction was to build the retaining wall for the trackbed/flowerbed. As we were building on an existing concreted yard, we did not have to lay any foundations; the bricks were layed directly onto the concrete slabs. I made the enormous mistake of using second-hand bricks, which I'd recovered from knocking a wall down elsewhere in the garden. The mortar was so strongly bonded to the bricks (as one would hope, of course) that each brick has to be freed from a layer of mortar with a chisel and club hammer. In the end preparing the bricks took longer than building the structure.
The photo below shows the brickwork and the first layer of soil. The ring of bricks at the front will eventually form a lake (in scale size) around which the track will run.