clive_t's Garden Line - The Fall and Rise of the Scampington Chipside Garden Railway

Thanks Pete, sadly not as much progress as I would like to make - yet again this past week has been so changeable with the weather here. Anyhoo, it's been a good sunny dry day today, and being free - for the moment - of other obligations, I was able to mix up a couple of batches of mortar and set to. The bay track bed is now done, and I've also done a fair bit on the other side of the platform:



Happy days!

 

Another quick update, and a bit of a landmark moment... the Chipside track bed is properly down and cemented in!

I also added a cattle dock to the goods area:

 

Bit of a delay in the updates due to some other things going on, however progress has been made. With the cement drying off, I was able to relay the track:



However, having looked again at the track layout in this area, and after having the same layout since inception (ie 15 years now) I decided I was not happy with one aspect of it... the goods siding joins the 'main line' (that is to say, the continuous loop line far left of picture) with no real chance of shunting without fouling it. So I thought about how to rearrange it so that access to the goods area is through the station runaround spur. All well and good, the only barrier being... what if any spare track do I have... of course, it's in the shed... somewhere...

After several fruitless attempts at finding my stash of spare track, I ended up finding it whilst I was looking for something else! Isn't that always the way... so, armed with some LGB curves and an off-cut of an Aristocraft curve, and a particularly keen hack-saw, I managed to reconfigure the track plan how I wanted it:



The new main line curve is a real mish-mash of radii, but it manages to get around ok - for a small bonus, in doing so I now have a spare left hand point!

 

Thanks Paul, yes I know how you feel as a hay fever sufferer since my early teens. Working outside in this heat has been particularly challenging. But the work already done on the replacement track bed has already paid dividends - no weeds growing through the tracks!

 

One of the other things I have been busying myself with is the conversion of one of my locos to battery power. I recently purchased the necessary items from Phil Partridge at RC Trains ( rctrains.co.uk ) - a very helpful young man he is too. At the moment it's just manual control, although I have a switch inside the cab to change direction should the fancy take me. One fine day, in the not too distant future, I shall be looking at further converting it to radio control.

Here's a short video clip of said converted loco (a Schoema diesel) striding purposefully round the circuit with two OBB coaches - look ma, no amps!

 

After what seems a huge amount of time doing some very necessary things around the house, I was able to dust off the shovel and garden fork, and return to navvying, in a different area of the line - this time the long lower straight at Dewey's End was cleared of the old trackbed gravel and the hopelessly ineffective weed barrier.

Before:



After clearance:



I then made a start on laying the new, bomb-proof track bed courtesy of some edging stones liberated from my neighbour's skip a few weeks ago:



This short length of bed took me ages to excavate. The ground was rock hard with so little rain over the past month or so. The following day (last Saturday) was more of the same in some absolutely withering heat.





All done with reclaimed Celcons and edging slabs - the only downside being the 4 bags of soil to dispose of!

The remainder of the new trackbed for the Dewey's End lower line was completed earlier yesterday:



With the track reinstated, it only remained for some rigorous "testing" to ensure all was well:







Yep, looks ok!

Finally for now, here's a quick vid clip of part of the test:

 

Thanks, yes it was good getting the track back down, and of course the opportunity - indeed, the obligation - to test it afterwards was difficult to pass up!

The track is virtually all rigid straights and curves (what one might call SetTrack but in larger scale) so no real need to fix it at the moment. I am however looking at my options for ballasting, so depending on how my experiments go there, I may have to secure it with loose-fitting screws in one or two places.

 

Took the best part of 4 days to get it cemented in, but I got there - no thanks at all to a massive root that was preventing me from levelling the blocks better:








Sod's Law it is, that there is always a small amount of cement left over when completing such an undertaking. Rather than just ditching it, I used it to add a sloping ramp on the recently rebuilt goods platform:



I recovered my DR van from the other side of the garden, and gave it a clean up, served eviction notices on about 40 snails and assorted arachnids which had taken up uninvited residence. It is now standing patiently at the end dock line:



Then yesterday afternoon, another small bit of work in preparation for ballasting - I decided I needed a buffer to go in the end dock, but I couldn't afford the space needed for the standard LGB rail-type buffer track piece. So I cut a spare one down to the absolute bare basics:



I then drilled a couple of holes in the track bed adjacent to the end dock, and the buffer slotted right in:



It fitted the buffer height on the van perfectly:



All ready for ballasting, I think!

 

Thanks Kim, yes that area is one of the 'photo opportunities' the line presents, as it gives a good chance of avoiding anything in the background that would compromise the desired realism!

The knees are ok at the moment thanks, but it does concentrate the mind, when getting down to ground level to apply the cement, to know that one false move could see me writhing on the ground in agony!

Lower level track now back in place:



No chance of weeds getting in the way here now!

 

Thanks Toto, although sometimes it's more akin to a drunken man wending his 'weary' way home; bouncing off walls, cars, lamp-posts, but generally heading in the right direction!

 

A bit more progress over the past couple of days, despite being hampered by real life. I bit the bullet and prepared a small area for ballasting. I've actually avoided the goods area for the time being, as I have some other work to do in that area which I can't start yet. Instead, I turned my attention to the Chipside Station bay platform; it is fairly stable now so it seemed a better place to start my ballasting activity. For this small section I figured a couple of screws to hold the track in place would suffice:





Then I mixed up some sieved potting grit (surprising how many larger lumps manage to sneak in to the bagging area for this stuff!) with some cement (roughly 3:1) and brushed it in along that section of track. For the area around the buffer stop, I added some finely sieved very dry soil into the mix, and similarly brushed that in. The hope is that this small area will eventually (when at last we are blessed with some rain) take on a greener tinge than the rest of it. Only time will tell, of course. Here's how it looks today, anyway:



Prior to this, I went into 'lumberjack' mode and rid myself of some particularly troublesome conifers - I'm pretty sure they weren't this big when I transplanted them from a small pot some years back:



Tiiiiimmberrrr.....



Tiiiiiiimmmberrrrrrrr....



Tiii... ah to heck with it, you get the drift:



I still need to somehow get the roots up - or at least cut it right down to ground level - but at least now I can see better what I need to do for the high level line going round the curve towards Dewey's End. This is hopefully where the C-section or U-section metalwork as used so successfully by Ralph will be employed, if I can source something like it.

 

Yesterday I managed to get the roots up. This took some effort, and most of the morning - oh, and a brand new washing line that I had to use as an improvised jack to overcome some stubborn resistance from the last - and largest - stump:



It looks a right mess now, but the way is clear for me to make a new bridge to carry the higher level line around the curve to Dewey's End Station and the pipe works.

 

I had one of those, too - it was actually in a pot in a corner of the garden, but rather unhelpfully it grew through the bottom of the pot and got to about 9 feet tall, until high winds blew it over some years back. That was an absolute nightmare to remove as I recall it. Sad thing is, they look great when they're small!