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....
