Grass Heart Vale - A Garden Railway in OO and O/16mm

[Grasslands]

Hi all, I thought I'd post up some stuff about my current garden railway project which has progressed well across the summer and autumn. I'm covering it in my blog, but it would be nice to get some thoughts about the next steps as I progress. 

 

So this is the first chronicle of my time designing and making a garden railway, which is now christened 'Grass Heart Vale Railway' (GHVR), I can imagine a 'Grass Heart Vale Express' headboard already and I thought I'd just cover some of the reasoning behind why I've had a crack at this.

 

I have some really nice OO gauge stock and I now have some rather lengthy consists including: x2 APTs and the western-modified Midland Pullman. All of these I love, but none of my future plans for a model railway build could realistically accommodate for running these. They are too long and I’d need to commit too much house real estate to the effort. So my options were simple; I either don’t buy them (or sell the ones I have); or I commit to designing something that can accommodate them to run. And so, I took the latter route and turned to my garden…

 

I’ve never really thought a garden railway was that viable of an option in OO gauge, as I thought it risked damage to the locos a bit too much. My youth growing up with visits to Don Jones’ 'Miniature New Street' in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands are very fond memories of mine, though. I used to love looking at the big coal power station miniature (not something easily made indoors) and watching the 'peaks' running around the various patios and along the ponds in Don's surprisingly large back garden. A lot of the stock did look damaged and tired in my later teens, though, which I guess is the risk of running at ground level and in foot swinging distance. Don’s railway also did see a lot of running and visitors of all ages, which no doubt added to some of its rougher edges. So generally, ground-level garden 'railwaying', was not part of my plan.

 

I then came across an alternative build method in the ‘trestle’ format of a garden model railway where the entire affair is raised off the ground, around what looks like a ladder frame. Now, this wasn’t far off some of the other options I’d considered for a loop run indoors, which included a fairly minimal scenery loop idea for my garage.

 

I then started considering a nice loop running through my shed that crossed half the garden as a good start, maybe crossing a pond with a nice railway bridge, possibly terminating in the security of my garage?

 

This YouTube video by New Junction where Richard spent his covid lockdown making an O gauge garden railway (with the gusto many of us manifested in those strange covid times), was a massive inspiration to this project, as I thought that the design method seemed sound and the build didn’t seem that challenging to tackle. I thought perhaps with a bit less COVID gusto, I could build on/improve a bit on the design concept too.

 

There were a few basic principles that have come out of these initial thoughts:

• Keep it simple - no complicated track work, no elaborate plans that will take an age to design, this is first and foremost a ‘play with trains track’
• Minimal risk of damage to stock - no overhanging bushes, no risk of running trains off the raised platform into the floor, as safe as a design I can make.
• A temporary (permanent) fixture - a nice contradiction, so I mean this is built to the spec of how long I might live in this house and is meant to be of a temporary design, so I have built it with somewhere between 3-7 years of play potential. Thus, no concrete and no absolute permanency.
• The garden still needs to be usable as a garden - although the garden railway will be a very obvious feature, I don’t want to lose the use of the garden in the process. This includes mowing the lawn, putting out the washing and all that type of normal garden jazz.

Although my thoughts initially focussed on perhaps a double line of OO gauge track, I then started wondering about adding a line of a larger gauge I've never worked in before (perhaps as a taster for something in the future), so I thought maybe a loop of O gauge would also provide some fun opportunities too?

 

I ordered a few sections of different PECO track types to see how they would look and might work outside.

 

I also ordered some decking samples as I wondered if I could work out a suitable width of recycled plastic decking to use as the main running surface, but I decided against this in the end as I thought creating curves with it would be a headache and I wasn't sure what would happen to it under heat exposure for long hot summers.

Keeping to principle 1, I didn’t want to spend too much time designing and planning out the garden railway (lining up some track on a bit of decking was enough for me), so I thought the sensible first step was to build a section as a ‘proof of concept’ to see how the build would work and get an idea of how much this will cost and how long it will take.

 

I’ll cover all of this next time, but for now, I’ll drop somewhat of a spoiler of how far I’ve got with the build by the end of Autumn 2023 and I intend to post some insights into how things progressed in future posts.

 

  

[Grasslands]

Trying to plan a layout (while not planning out a layout) is an entertaining business, but it makes sense in my head, at least. As soon as I start drawing out plans of my garden railway, then I start hyper-focussing on meeting those plans/expectations rather than just adapting pragmatically as I go.

Brewery Pit was built in a similar manner, but I remember thinking through how to conceal off-scene areas and stuff was quite challenging. I think, to date only, one rather sh**e plan view of my garden railway 'Grass Heart Vale' exists, which is overlayed from a photo I took from my drone.

 

My original plan in my head was to have a fairly modest garden railway which ran through or in front of the shed and formed an oval around the south half of my garden (mostly avoiding the lawn) and would then run along the side of my house and into my garage for safe storage.

After messing around with the lengths of track I ordered, I decided that I would stick to OO Gauge Code 100 track, as I thought the garden wasn’t really the time to mess about with finescale fidelity. The thicker rail heads and sturdier sleeper joints of Code 100 track will be needed to cope with the new climate change-infused variability we will be getting as the years tick by.

 

As mentioned previously, I also wanted to dabble in some larger scales so I was considering adding some O gauge track, or maybe some 16mm gauge (SM32) track. My original plan for this was to have half of the larger scale loop as O gauge track and switching to 16mm track for the other half, but I wasn’t really prepared for how different the size and scale of the rail heads are (despite being the same gauge). SM32 track has bigger rail making it fairly impossible to link up without some special fishplates and raising up the O gauge track. I asked on some garden railway groups about the running qualities of O gauge locos and 16mm locos on these different types of track and it seems it all comes down to the flanges! O gauge will run just fine on 16mm/SM32 track, but 16mm stock will likely run aground on O gauge track as the flanges are much deeper.

 

So that was the O gauge track out of the window! I then pondered on how bothered I was about running standard gauge locomotives on what is made to look like narrow gauge track. Others who do this don’t seem to care and I guess, scale accuracy is somewhat of a secondary concern, as I’m in the garden. You will see massive wheelbarrows and brooms and fences in the background. The fun will be in the running. So that matter is settled. I also dabbled with the thought of running a OO track inside the SM32 track. I guess that is still an option, but I might keep that in my mind until the track loops are complete.

So I was now armed with the number of tracks I wanted (x2 OO gauge lines and x1 16mm line) and had an idea of what type of surface area would be required for that, so I could now take some construction material and measurement notes from the New Junction video and have a crack at making a ‘proof of concept’ section.

I opted for making a straight section against the southern fence, as this is the longest straight and a section I will most certainly need irrespective of how my thoughts on the general layout work out later.

 

The materials needed were:

• 75mm x 75mm Treated Timber (fence posts) - for vertical supports
• 47mm x 47mm Treated Timber - for horizontal supports
• 75mm x 22mm Treated Timber - for side lengths of the frame
• 18mm thick (pre cut to top width) non-treated ply - for the top surface of the model
• Waterproof PVA - for sealing the ply
• Sledge Hammer - for driving posts into the ground
• Meta posts (75mm x 75mm) - for driving into the ground
• Wood paint
• and some long wood screws (approx 10cm)

It was a fairly simple bit of woodwork, really. I used the full 2.4m length of the side frames (as it saved me from having to make too many woodcuts and kept everything accurate). I then cut the bracing supports to the width I wanted to account for my three lines of track. When combined these pieces essentially act as the support frame and then it is topped with a thick surface panel on which the track will be laid. Because of this, the top surface of the ladder frame must be as straight and square as possible so the top board sits on it properly. To sort this out I fixed the inner frame together with its side and braces upside down, while it was lying on a flat piece of board.

 

Next, I needed to decide on what height the railway would be from the ground and then cut the support posts accordingly. I must admit, that I didn’t give a massive amount of thought to this, other than having the ability to step over it. One challenge with my garden is that is far from flat!! My garden is pretty funny actually at how graded it is in different places. I was worried about having to work out complicated grading calculations. Still, I think I roughly worked out that if this section was fairly equal to the top of the brick wall, then it ‘should’ be near ground level when I eventually built it closer to the house. So I just went with that for now, as surely the builders of the wall that sits beneath my fence knew what they were doing better than me.

 

So I cut the fence posts and drove them into the meta post spikes with a mallet, the first of which dived into the soil and clay fairly easily and the second smacked into the root of an old conifer tree. I had a crack at trying to get it out, but it wouldn’t come back, so I just concluded to leave it as is with part of the spike above the surface and I reduced the post accordingly. A bit annoying from a symmetry point of view, but I’ll live.

 

Then I fixed the ladder-like support frame to the posts and used a spirit level to make sure it was as flat as I could get it and drove some quite long woodscrews through the bracers into the post. This often meant that I had to fix the frame bracings at half the width of a fence post to the end of a frame so I could easily fix two sections together around a fence post (if that makes sense). As time went by, this often became a job of making sure bracings were planned for fitting where fence posts were going in, which I think I have done in advance and also after posts have been driven into the ground (so take your pick!)

 

At this point, I mostly admired my work and also went through a fun ritual of bringing out my BR maroon warship to do some visual checks and to see how it would look in photos and videos and the like, which was also its job when I built my Quarry Transfer diorama many years ago, which I wrote up for BRM magazine.

 

So that was day one!

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 15 by Grasslands

[Grasslands]

at the moment this is all quite retrospective, but hopefully useful anyway. I am still mulling how I am going to go about feeding power to it when the structure is completed (including the shed). At the moment I want a 'big red button' that kills the power for when I hear the doorbell or some such, haha.

 

I have some armoured cable to run between my shed and the main house RCA. It isn't a particularly appealing job for winter, though.