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Garden railway mark III: laying out the site

Last modified: Fri Aug 3 08:50:10 2007

Our garden has a soil area about 60 feet long by 20 feet wide; the rest is paved. Of that soil area, about 20 feet by 10 feet can be allocated to the railway. This is much bigger that our first G-scale effort, but still very small by garden railway standards.
      The main design problem however, is not the size; it is that the garden has a huge slope -- it's about 1:5 at worst. What's more, it slopes not only front to back, but left to right, and is uneven in both directions. Now, no G-scale train is going to be very happy on a gradient like that; even 1:50 might to too steep. So, clearly something had to be done. Now, if we just wanted to flatten the whole 20-by-10 area, we would have to dig a cutting that was three to four feet deep in one corner. Alternatively, we could have elevated the whole track, but we would have had to elevate it by three to four feet in some places, and nothing in others. Neither of these solutions is very satisfactory. The elevated track would look very odd, and have little potentional for scenery. The deep cutting would provide a small cliff for children to fall over, and it would be very difficult to work in.
      The solution I have adopted is to build the railway on two interlocking terraces with a separate run of track on each. Whilst it would have been nice to be able to have a single run of track encompass the whole plot, there is no elegant way to accomplish this (bearing in mind that this is not my retirement home, so I can't turn the garden into a giant earthworks). Each terrace is cut into the higher end of the plot by about a foot, and the terraces are about a foot above each other at the highest point. This arrangement does allow us to run the tracks above one another, with bridges and other interesting features, so this partly makes up for the disadvantage that the tracks themselves aren't particularly long.

Overlooking the railway plot. This is an early stage of construction, but most of the earthworks are finished, and there is some track down. The top-right corner of the plot is about three feet higher than the bottom-left, so the earth is banked in terraces

The earth is held back by larch-lap fencing and log rolls from B&Q. The fencing is quite expensive (about £5 per metre), but it's spiked so it can be hammered directly into the ground, and will hold back quite a weight of soil. The log rolls are much cheaper and can, of course, form curves. However, they have to be staked into position, which is a chore. If they aren't properly staked, then they fall over when someone stands on the soil next to them.
      On this railway, I've taken some trouble to ensure that the track is perfectly level, to the extend of going around with a spirit level. No doubt the level will change slightly as the soil water content changes, but if it starts off wrong it can only get worse.

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