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Build a simple garden railway in an afternoon

Last modified: Fri Aug 3 08:49:15 2007

If you don't have space for a model railway in your house, and even if you do, it's worth thinking about the garden as an alternative. The advantages are that there's usually more room, and you may find there's ready-made scenery in the form of vegetation. The disadvantage is that you need to be quite careful about wheather protection; model railway track is not really designed to be used outdoors, and mains-operated equipment has to be prevented from getting wet for obvious reasons.
      It is possible to get large-scale (`G-gauge') models and track, specifically for garden use. This is all very well, but it's expensive and not interchangeable with smaller-scale models that you may have elsewhere. So we built our first garden railway from ordinary OO-guage track (since writing this article, we have started work on a G-scale railway as well!).

The railway runs along the top of a low wall, then carries on around a corner and along another wall. Ultimately it will reconnect to form a complete simple loop about 50' long, but that's a job for next summer.

Because we can't fix the track directly to brickwork, and it would be too noisy and clattery even if we could, we made a trackbed from fibreboard. This is easy to cut and can be fastened to brickwork with PVA glue. Fibreboard is porous, so Bryony applied a thick layer of varnish to the exposed top and edges so that it would not rot in the rain.

We then pinned the track to the fibreboard. It's essential to use nickel-silver track for outdoor installation; plain steel will tarnish and be a pain to keep clean. Also, I have soldered the track joints, to prevent rain sediment getting into the joints and causing poor electrical contact. You'll need to leave some joints unsoldered, to allow for expansion. Otherwise the track could buckle in extremes of temperature (even in London!). In this case, you'll need to bridge the gaps by soldering wires to both tracks close to the joint. Any track joint that is slack enough to cope with expansion will be too slack for proper electrical contact.

Because the track run is quite long, it is handy to have a system by which the train can controlled while standing in different places. Traditionally, we would have done this using a hand-held controller on a long cable. These days, radio control is a more useful technique. The little hut on the left of the photo is a radio-controlled transformer, available from Hornby.

The receiver runs on a low-voltage power supply -- it is not directly mains-operated. This is useful for garden installtion, because the mains transformer can remain indoors, and only the low-voltage cable needs to be run in the garden.

The receiver, hand-held controller, and power supply are supplied in a single package including a track connector, and cost less than £20. This is surprisingly affordable, and for a simple loop of track you don't need any other control or power equipment: just plug in and go.

The hand-held controller in use. The radio-control system is designed for children, so the controller has only three, large buttons: `forward', `backward', and `stop'.

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