My old garden layout

I was up at my parents house a few days ago and i was rummaging through some old pictures and found some pictures of the garden layout we had in my Gloucester home.

I was first built some 20 years ago when we first moved into that home. it always followed the same basic layout with a loop at either end of a long stretch of twin track. this made it look double track in the middle but it wasn't.

in its first incarnation we made the mistake of following the contours of the land. which was fine until i got a hornby tender drive mallard for Christmas one year and it wouldn't go up the hill!
This caused a major rebuild!

The top loop was inside the shed and this was moved from waist height to ankle height. inside the loop was a small terminus station.
this is what you can see in these next couple of pictures.


In this picture you can see the loop running through the tunnel at the top of the picture. the small black square in the far right is the other tunnel mouth.


for the first few years the top loop was in the shed (as above and the bottom loop was around a small raised garden and over a suspension bridge over a pond.
the stretch in between was raised up on some roofing timbers. despite the way it looks in this picture they worked very well except that i had to turn them over each year because of the sagging.



To start with the bottom loop was quite an elaborate affair with a station with 4 platforms. 2 on either side of the loop.
After a few years this was replaced with a much smaller raised garden and the railway gave way. after this the bottom loop was never quite big enough and i was forever rerailing stock on the tight bend.
Over the years i tried several variations. i built a station half way along the middle section that lasted a couple of years. i tried improving the bottom loop with a larger freestanding structure which lasted a summer.

When a compost heap was put halfway along the garden the top loop was moved out of the shed and circled the compost heap instead. this made it a much larger loop and it ran much better.

This is a picture of the first incarnation of the bottom loop and station.


Sadly i don't know of any other photographs that exist of the railway. i would particularly like a picture of the viaduct that my father made going over the fish pond.

The railway was taken up when i moved out of that house and left for university. i still have some of the track.

Generally the garden railway was fine. the only real problems we had were the sleepers going brittle after a few years out in the sun. near the end of the railways life the middle section was in a pretty poor state.

This railway kept me entertained and out of trouble throughout my summer holidays for nearly 10 years. i think there was only one year when it didn't get used and the last 3 or so summers it was very well used. i live in London now and there are times when i would love to be back out in that garden just watching the trains go buy. it was very peaceful, a quality i have come to appreciate more and more in life.
building the railway was also great fun. the times i spent on it with my father are among the happiest of my life. one year i got a toy tool kit for Christmas. after that i was always getting in the way!!

The railway existed mostly through the wilderness years of poor quality British rolling stock and i was converted to American stock by a good friend Rod Pickering. he provided reliable rolling stock that was happy on the sometimes less than reliable trackwork!

Peter