Monday 28 January 2019

Constructing the railway I - planning and starting

Planning and starting!

In 2017 I started to construct a new garden railway layout in our backyard garden.

The first step was figuring out a track plan for the layout. This was a challenge as we just moved in to our new home and the garden was not very big. To be honest, it was in fact rather small.
The space available for a layout was about 1,60 by 6 meter. The limited space was however not a bad thing since my old garden railway had grown a bit too big and therefor became somewhat neglected and overgrown. The smaller the layout, the easier to maintain! But how can you make a small layout look interesting?

The idea

As I wanted a continuous run of trains an oval track plan formed the base of the plan. But a train just running around in circles is not very attractive to see.  It is more interesting to see a train come and go 'somewhere" out of sight. But how do you establish this in such a small space?

The solution I choose for this was the concept of 'scenic breaks' that is commonly used on smaller scale indoor layouts. Its a combination of planning the track and build the landscape scenery in such a way that the train comes in and goes out of sight as you observe it from a viewing position. You have to change your viewing position to see where it goes or to see another part of the layout. You can achieve this for instance by a hill with tunnel or placing a forest or buildings that blocks the view.
Also the height of the layout is of importance; scenery breaks are more difficult if you watch the layout from a bird eyes view than when you observe it from eye-height view.

The trackplan

The track plan I came up with was an oval with one long straight side. The other side (the front of the layout) has several bends as like the track is crawling along a hillside or following an imaginary river or something. The bends give opportunities for scenic breaks and the running of the train has become more interesting.


Between the two sides mentioned the flowerbed will be raised higher and planted with a variation of greenery, like dwarf rhododendrons, dwarf conifers or small buxus. This will visually divide the both sides and (hopefully) takes the train out of sight, at least for some points of the layout.
Also the track bed itself will be somewhat raised providing opportunities for differences in landscape heights. See the construction of the trackbed for more information about this.

Two rainy pictures of the final trackplan. No scenic breaks aplied here yet!
(March 2018)




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