Garden

To have a garden is to require a garden railway to adorn it. That's it, nothing difficult, one just has to recognise that this is so. The SMRS has one. Of course.

Simple and profound that this truth is, there are still some unfortunates to whom it is not obvious, to say the least. Fortunately there are many reasons available to convince one's critics why it is so. One may be lack of spare bedroom space indoors for anything bigger than an N-gauge circle. Another is the need to provide the carefully-landscaped garden with the ultimate designer accessory, to make it stand out from the average domestic plot and give it an air of distinction and style.

And so it is with the SMRS. We have a garden, or rather the club premises has one which it's temporal owner, ex-Railtrack, has seen fit to allow us to use, and maintain at our own expense. For the easement of bureaucracy they have conceded this without going to the trouble of giving us any legal right to go so much as a centimetre outside the back door of the clubhouse, outside loo notwithstanding. An uneasy truce prevails, with each side pretending it knows nothing of the matter.

The idea of a garden railway had been maturing gently for some time, whilst the indoor railway projects have slowly developed towards middle-age. One factor was the donation of a quantity of old coarse scale O-gauge track, hand-built and of good quality. Like all good modellers we hoarded this largesse carefully until we could find a use for it. The trigger was the decision to clear the garden of its considerable piles of rubbish and create something more worthy of the name. Removal of the hedge separating us from the adjacent 1:1 scale commercial operation sparked the thought that we could use part of the border thus exposed to create a long-needed freight link with the shed at the far end of the property.

At present it is unpowered, allowing the purists to play with live steam, clockwork and the occasional battery electric. To facilitate construction the line was kept simple, merely a trench in the soil along the side of the concrete path, filled with 10mm limestone chips. We resisted the temptation to reach through the fence to acquire the somewhat over-scale genuine article. A line of bricks served to restrain the ballast and the single-line track was then laid loose on top. At the far end of the garden a loop was installed, of somewhat variable geometry as the remaining track was a mixture of different curves and straights. Trial and error saw both ends meet, in protoypical engineering style. A sprung point allows the traffic to go round the loop and return whence it came.

Two years on, the track has not so much bedded in as subsided in places. A major overhaul was therefore instituted, with a further hardware donation allowing the line to be double-tracked. Removal of the point allows the possibility of electrification to supplement the live steam and battery locomotives currently certificated for use on the line. The quantity of extra chippings required has been considerable, as was the weight of the bags, but the increase in operational scope and reliability has been significant. Now if only the full-size replica could follow suit....

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