Having gone to the trouble of indexing my blog I discovered I had no entries for the garden section of the empire. So decided it was about time the big stuff got a starting post. As the weather has got colder and wetter it is far to say the garden has really taken a back burner in the priority list, but during the summer it was the only thing on the list !!

I have always liked the idea of using the garden, my return to model railways was with an On30 garden line, which became a OO garden line when I was seduced by the amount of good quality ready to run stuff. It is true smaller scales in the outdoors work, and apart form cleaning the 120' of track with a track rubber before each running session, I never really had any technical problems. The big problem is the British weather and the amount of rain !!!! i spent more time looking out of the window at the railway than I did using it !!

Anyway, after leaving the outdoors and doing OO and On30 in the new shed, I still had a craving for the outdoor life. I have always liked bigger scales but I couldnt justify the expense of LGB and the like. I began to wonder about making my own track as a cheaper option, and just buying one loco. but it was still expensive.

The break through was finding Playmobil !!! it was cheap and could form the basis of some half decent models. After some ebay bidding I bought my first set.

Its true its very toylike but the track is plastic (no cleaning) the motors are battery powered R/C controlled and easily strip out..

This opened up a range of potentials

A basic repaint of the original body shell

A shunter built on the motor block..

or a Garratt built on two motor blocks

The track was laid by bedding it on postfix.

Its not fine scale modelling but its fun when the sun shines !!! It will probably be a while before the next 45mm blog post (spring?) but at least i will have a section to post it in now !

To close here is the Garratt in action.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCdW4-xn1UQ