Garden Railroad Layouts | garden railroad construction

No Need for Green Thumb Yet… Though a Contractor Wouldn't Hurt  - Surveying for Garden Rail

OK… maybe you don't need a contractors license, although it sure wouldn't hurt. When planning your spring and summer fun time with your garden railroad, you'll definitely need some tools more suited for the outdoors as apposed to those spoiled tools of the trade you normally store in house. Shovels, levels, saws, drainage tubes… Heck, you may even need to pour a footer. All these vises of creation and destruction are needed in your quest for fun and relaxation!

Your first move when plotting a garden railroad layout is to scope the lay of the land. Determine your slope or degree of decline and elevation in order to figure out where your bridges, culverts and trestles will be forged.

If the slope of your yard is to great then be ready to level it off to such a degree it doesn't, cause any construction problems such as flooding or difficulties crafting traversable track layouts.

We'll Draft a List of Items to Make This Quick and Painless

• 3 [2x2's] of adequate size to survey your designated plot
• Carpenters level to place on horizontal 2×2 when determining flushness
• A helping hand… as this is a two person endeavor
• and this Formula for calculating grade… Grade = Change in Elevation divided by Distance

Once you and your apprentice, spouse or friend have made absolutely sure that all is plume… then its time for the next step… Bullwork!

Bullwork is a nasty word for – Working your butt off! This may be the heaviest lifting you'll ever do in the model train hobby. Bullwork will require you to lift and place hand picked blocks of concrete that will form your retaining wall.

If concrete isn't quite to your liking then perhaps limestone or some other hard heavy inexpensive girthy material will do.

You'll need to build your retaining wall up to grade. You do this by filling in the area inside the wall with earth and gravel. As all this is being completed remember to account for any streams and ponds needing excavation. Classy model trains.com will detail the intricacies of stream and pond creation in future posts as the are separate monsters within themselves. So lets move to the next step… Roadbed.

For most environments rocks of relatively equal size are recommended. In truth there is no finite method of crafting roadbed. It ultimately depends on your environment.

A safe recourse is to construct roadbed as it is prototypically done. On true to life rail, the track actually rests in the thick layers of ballast. This will allow for your rail to sit as the temperatures change causing the track to shrink and expand during summer and winter seasons. You may find yourself adjusting track once or twice a year but thats a small price to pay for cheating mother matures attempt at derailing your masterpiece.

Dig 2" or 3" trench, fill with ballast until it's just shy of grade. Now the fun starts. Lay track and make sure ballast is level or you will hate yourself later. To make leveling easy try to use flatter rocks as rounded stones will undoubtedly roll shifting your track out of sink.

Classymodeltrains.com will review additional rockbed techniques in future posts but for know this will give you a push in the wright direction.

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