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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.I decided that for ease construction and maintenance, and good play value for the children, the railway had to conform to certain criteria.
First, it had to be built from standard parts. While bending OO flexible track to a specific shape is not a big job, 45mm track is a different matter, requiring specialist tools.
Second, the track should form at least one complete loop, for continuous running. Other track features were also desirable, such as a station lay-by for trains to wait, and a couple of sidings. However, ultimately my children mostly like to watch the trains go around and around. Now, the problem with this strategy when you're working in a small space is that in 45mm track, even the smallest loop is actually quite large. The absolute minimum curve radius that most G-scale locos will negotiate is 2 feet. Most garden railway purists scoff at such a non-prototypical curve, but if your garden is the size of mine, the choice is between two-foot bends or straight lines; and that's no choice at all as far as my children are concerned. It turns out that LGB `radius 1' track has a curve radius of two feet. That doesn't meen that you can fit a loop into a four-foot width: the two feet is measured between the centres of the sleepers. The actual space required is a whisker under 1300mm, so I decided to make the soil area in the track bed exactly 1300mm wide. It's worth bearing in mind that the loco and coaches overhang the rail sleepers on both sides, particular the inside on bends. In practice this means that you need about two inches of clearance on either side of the sleepers all around the curve. Of course, for most people all this will be a non-issue; it's only a big deal if you're trying to accomodate a garden railway in such a small space.
Third, it should look nice. While realism is important to `real' railway modellers, I remain unconvinced that a realistic, but ugly, railway building adds much to a garden.
Fourth, it should be genuinely permanent. That is, all parts of the railway including the buildings and details should stand being left outdoors indefinitely. This puts certain constraints on the construction techniques; in particular, everything has to be weatherproof.
Fifth, the costs should be proportionate. That is, where it is very much cheaper to build something from scratch, rather than buying it, we have done so. Garden railways are perhaps one aspect of railway modelling where it really is cheaper to build from scratch. Moreover, the large scale means that scratch-building is far more straightfoward than it is for smaller scales.
It is easy to underestimate the work involved in building a garden railway, even a small one like ours. Our layout is almost as small as it's possible for a G-scale layout to be, and yet it used:
- nearly a ton of soil and compost;
- about two hundred pounds of sand;
- about a hundred pounds of cement;
- about a hundred pounds of grit;
- a pallet-load of bricks;
- paving, edging slabs, pea shingle, breeze blocks, etc., etc.
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