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Garden railway mark IV

Last modified: Fri Aug 3 08:51:56 2007

This is my fourth attempt at building a garden railway. My previous efforts have worked reasonably well when properly maintained, but failed miserably in on `low maintenance' design criterion. The main reason for this is the striking hardiness and fecundicity of the weeds where I live. I could dig them into the ground and soak the whole area with Paraquat, and within a couple of weeks the nettle from Hell would be bursting up from underneath the trackbed. There are weeds in my garden that can push through a half-inch chunk of plywood, and choke the track completely in a matter of days. So I've decided, with some reluctance, to raise the whole railway off the ground on a wooden deck. I'll be keeping the pond and waterfall, and the other stuff that seemed to work on previous versions, but I'll be building on wood rather than mud.

The deck is built on 6"x2" joists, supported by 3"x3" fence posts, set in concrete. The photo, left, shows an early stage of construction. The deck itself was a modified all-in-one garden decking kit which I bought from eBay. This purchase worked out cheaper than buying the timber from a timber yard, strangely enough. I plan to extend the deck in another tier, to about 16 feet further up the garden. Because of the slope of the garden (sigh) the new tier, like the existing one, will be about two feet higher at one end than at the other. I haven't worked out yet how will integrate the two tiers in a natural-looking way -- that's a job for next year, anyway.

It took about a week of evenings to build the deck, including cladding the sides with logs to make a storage space underneath. To sink the fence posts I invested in a soil auger -- a sort of giant screw with a handle -- and that was ten quid very well spent. Because I'm lazy, I cut all the posts too long, bolted the joists on the posts, then sawed the tops off the posts flush with the joists. The offcuts will always come in useful.
      Once the joists were in place and levelled, putting down the actual decking went relatively quickly.

Over the last few months since construction started, the deck has settled slightly under its own weight and that of the water in the pond. So there are gradients along the track that weren't there when I first constructed the deck. I think this is almost inevitable, unless the deck is constructed on a soild concrete slab. Soil moves, particularly with the torrential rains we've had lately in what passes for summer around here. In any event, I've had to chock up the track in places to level out the gradients, but nowhere more than a half inch, and usually less than a quarter.
I've managed to preserve most of the wooden buildings from my previous garden railways, although all are looking a bit weather-beaten after five British summers and winters (often all in the same day!) But I've built a new shed for the steam-powered workshop, because it wasn't easy to see the machinery inside the old one. The new one doesn't give the same weather protection to the steam machinery inside, so it will be going indoors in the winter.
Of course you have to have a tunnel on a railway. Again, it's made out of plywood with stripwood trimmings. The barn next to the tunnel in the photo is a stable from a Christmas Nativity scene, or something. It's completely to the wrong scale but the kids insist on having it there.
The pond, rather than being dug out of the ground, is now a black plastic tank suspended from the deck joists. It's not clear from the photo, but there's a hole at the top of the tank through which the water pipe passes, to carry pumped water up to the top of the waterfall. The pump is submerged in the pond, as before. The pond is much bigger than it looks, because it extends under the decking. The waterfall is made of real rocks, supported on a wooden skeleton. Since I'm not aiming for authenticity, but durability, I thought it better to make a `feature' of the wooden frame and keep it visible, than to try to hide it with more rocks. The problem is that rocks are heavy, and I guess there's only so much weight that the deck will support.

If the mark IV railway is still one one piece next summer, I'll consider extending it. For now, it seems to be a huge improvement over previous versions because I can just throw a switch and the trains start chuffing away. Previously I would have had to spend an hour weeding first.
      The approach to modelling, I think, is only appropriate if what you're building is primarily a toy for the kiddies (or adults) to play with. It's impossible to get any kind of realism. But you don't get realism anyway, when your children insist that a foot-high garden gnome must live on the top of the waterfull (no, really -- I had to take it off for the photos, and it's back now).

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