1/32 finescale in the garden

[andrew60]

Firstly an apology, I've posted very little on here up to now, but I have taken the plunge and started construction of a garden railway these last few months. So this seems like a good moment to give my developing layout a wider airing. I have been modelling in 1/32, WR diesel era, for many years and originally built a very basic indoor shunting layout, but it just wasn't enough for the trains I was constructing, so lumbered with a large garden and a dislike of gardening there's been only one course of action. Many of the construction techniques for the line and its trains have been adopted before, and with some help from others and months of dry weather, development has proceeded apace.

I can fill in the detail of the last nine months with further posts, but for now three pictures which show:
1) the earliest tentative steps cutting an 'S' shaped alignment in the grass after plotting the course with bamboo poles, and pulling apart some of the garden walling;
2) seven months later and the same view with Cliff Barker's finescale track placed on the concrete base set in a welded steel frame;
3) a train placed on the line, catching the evening light after the track was trimmed, joined and properly aligned.

More posts to follow on how I got from 1 to 3 and beyond if others are interested, and as time allows...

 

[mswjr]

Nice to it on concrete, i had a gauge 1 layout in the garden on marine ply, it did not last long. and yes please more post when you have time.

 

[David B]

Really impressive - I love the flowing curves on the hillside and the baby NBL looks right at home. I still remember the last one I ever saw, rounding the curve at Midgham in 1971 or 1972 on an unexpectedly long Reading-bound freight train. I would be very interested in more details of how you’ve built the line - I’ve used treated wooden boards for my last two SM32 lines, and while these lasted well (10 years without rot for the first line and 6 years so far for the latest line) and have successfully provided a solid foundation for really heavy live steamers such as an NGG16 Garratt, I have run out of patience with the sheer amount of track fettling needed as the wood expands and contracts depending on what our increasingly unhelpful weather chooses to throw at us. I would love to understand more about the techniques you’ve used, as it looks as if you have created a completely stable trackbed which will be largely immune to the effects of heat, cold, damp, etc.

 

[andrew60]

Really impressive - I love the flowing curves on the hillside and the baby NBL looks right at home. I still remember the last one I ever saw, rounding the curve at Midgham in 1971 or 1972 on an unexpectedly long Reading-bound freight train. I would be very interested in more details of how you’ve built the line - I’ve used treated wooden boards for my last two SM32 lines, and while these lasted well (10 years without rot for the first line and 6 years so far for the latest line) and have successfully provided a solid foundation for really heavy live steamers such as an NGG16 Garratt, I have run out of patience with the sheer amount of track fettling needed as the wood expands and contracts depending on what our increasingly unhelpful weather chooses to throw at us. I would love to understand more about the techniques you’ve used, as it looks as if you have created a completely stable trackbed which will be largely immune to the effects of heat, cold, damp, etc.

Thanks, they are not new techniques and in fact others have used them on here although the threads will be quite old now. I'll post stuff in sequence as the line has developed. There does seem to be a widespread convention in G1 of using timber but as you say it starts to degrade pretty quickly, and really won't work for a line at ground level like mine. I suspect many see timber as an easy way to get going, but that may be a case of 'short term gains, long term losses', as you've described. Another approach is scaffolding poles supporting cable trays topped with a cement fibreboard (see the Garden Railway Pipedream thread on here) - I've no personal experience of it but it looks equally stable and effective, and may be easier and less elaborate than the approach I've adopted.

 

[andrew60]

Not the most enticing set of pictures, but a necessary phase of garden railway construction, mostly involving mud and earth moving last winter. Things tend to look worse before they get better with this sort of project. The garden is about 100' wide but on a significant cross-slope, so a 'roundy-roundy' layout wasn't really an option, and I didn't like the idea of much of it raised up on waist-high trestles, or higher. Having a line at your feet down on the grass was equally unattractive, so I decided to use the contours and raised beds to best effect so that much of it will be easy to access and blend with the contours of the garden. The idea has been a line with as far as possible gentle curves wending through the landscape, rather like the real thing. However even with 100' of running, an end-to-end layout felt a bit short in G1 so I opted for a turnback or reversing loop at one end. This will be non-scenic with a minimum curve of 8'6"-9', but will allow running to a roughly scale 1 and 1/3 mile.


I flatter myself that I became quite good at dry stone walling, albeit in a small way.


A shelf was cut along the front of the raised bed.


Most of the course of the line visible across the raised beds, intersected with steps at the mid-point and a useful access for power etc. I used nothing more than long spirit levels and bamboo poles to determine the horizontal and vertical alignments, although given the distance, a theodolite would have been a better option. Some heavy duty earth moving was undertaken with help from Dave, and more dry wall building. The elevated turnback loop will be off to the right and will come back round to meet the projecting 'prow' of earth/stone in the middle of the picture.


Dave's dinky little French railcar providing a splash of colour in the winter mud.

 

[Renovater]

On that last photo if you had gone in close the potential was there for a really impressive image with that backdrop and the light.....Colin.

 

[James Spooner]

Thanks, they are not new techniques and in fact others have used them on here although the threads will be quite old now. I'll post stuff in sequence as the line has developed. There does seem to be a widespread convention in G1 of using timber but as you say it starts to degrade pretty quickly, and really won't work for a line at ground level like mine. I suspect many see timber as an easy way to get going, but that may be a case of 'short term gains, long term losses', as you've described. Another approach is scaffolding poles supporting cable trays topped with a cement fibreboard (see the Garden Railway Pipedream thread on here) - I've no personal experience of it but it looks equally stable and effective, and may be easier and less elaborate than the approach I've adopted.

Another possibility these days is plastic timber. On the FR we use plastic sleepers and you can get UV resistant plastic, with an expected lifespan of sixty years, or enough to see most of us out…

Nigel

 

[JimJim]

A great start to your garden railway as others have already stated it has a bit of everything, flowing curves, gauge 1, what's not to like. Looking forward to seeing more. Good luck
Jim

 

[Alan]

I'm enjoying this.

 

[John Bruce]

Excellent job, curves are good!

John Bruce.

 

[andrew60]

Come the spring, and with most of the earth moving done, it was time to get the welder in and learn how to concrete. The unusually dry weather allowed a lot of progress to be made and I've been fortunate from that point of view in that 2025 proved to be a good year to start a garden railway.


Bamboo poles established the alignment, after which vertical steel 'posts' were driven into the ground at various points and clamped to horizontal long steel bars which defined the edges of the track base on each side. The steel edging finds it's own curves but much care is needed to ensure it is as level as possible, both crossways and lengthways - hence all the spirit levels. Cross pieces are then welded between the outer steels at regular intervals to create a rigid framework.


Dave the welder, complete with fetching pith helmet, proceeding apace with the turnback loop in the April heat. The garden statue on the right averts her gaze from the developing destruction. At this point, my thoughts veered wildly from 'what on earth am I doing wrecking the garden?', to 'this is the best train set, ever' - and back again. It's fair to say that as time has gone on, I've had less of the former thoughts, and more of the latter. The trestles were later replaced with simpler and more pleasing scaffold poles.



The welded steel framework for the double track loop section, with track placed to give scale. Although it is mostly single track, in my mind the line evokes the constant curves of the Cornish main line, which fits my locos and rolling stock. Gentle reverse curves are to me a more interesting way of watching the trains go by, and I had no reason to adopt the common 'tabletop' approach of a long straight with abruptly sharp curves at each end.


Shuttering and concreting at the far end of the line. Shuttering was done in sections using all manner of old ply and plastic, retained with numerous props and poles, all sealed with gaffer tape, section by section to stop the concrete leaking. The steel cross sections provide useful end stops for each mix of concrete.



The concrete sections going well, while I attempt to ensure the whole thing isn't overrun with bindweed, having half an eye on future planting. The last section of concrete was only completed relatively recently, which deserved opening a bottle of champagne, but I simply went indoors mightily relieved for a cup of tea.


All this heavy construction wasn't done without considerable help from others (it's definitely not a one person job), particularly Dave, who's American Switcher thingy takes up position on the by now set concrete. In the midst of all this construction (destruction?), it's important to give yourself periodic reminders of why you're doing it. Compared with layouts in the smaller scales, it's an enormous undertaking.

 

[David Halfpenny]

I love everything about what you are doing, Andrew!
Perhaps that's because, until recently, I had a very similar plot - same size, same slope, same layout solution.

(But in a wood, with tree roots ruling out both excavation and any rigid trackbed.)​

More likely because I've always wanted a railway in a living landscape, and was puzzled that almost nobody else in G1 was interested - with honourable exceptions like these:









David 1/2d

 

[andrew60]

Thank you David, some terrific photographs there with great atmosphere - it's the outdoor light that always does it for me and adds an extra layer of realism. It's also about the details of track and train as I will try to develop on this thread - modelling outdoors rather than just running trains is I suppose what I'm trying to aim for. It's also worth saying that you don't always need a huge garden to model in G1 (unless of course you want to run long trains very fast). There are examples of G3, never mind G1, sitting comfortably in small suburban gardens, and some lovely small G1 cameos, albeit indoors.

 

[David Halfpenny]

There are examples of . . . some lovely small G1 cameos, albeit indoors.

While it's damned near impossible to make any model railway 100% "scenic", at least Those Indoors can isolate Cameos using plywood viewing windows (as beloved of exhibition layouts), or use scenic breaks like over-bridges and large buildings.
Outdoors, where all our 'workings' are exposed, we need other tricks to evade commonplace garden distractions (like water butts, fences, sheds and guests). In other words, we need to create a sequence of relatively sanitised Cameos within the overall layout.

My shots above all depend on both contriving a backdrop and cropping the photo.

Since anyone can crop a photo, I strongly suspect that a key factor in outdoor Realism boils down to contriving a sequence of suitable backdrops.​

​

This G1 garden shot (the highest-ranked live-steam shot in an American online photo competition):



involved about an hour's work 'arranging' somebody else's garden - and it's in monochrome to conceal various brightly coloured knick-knacks that I couldn't reasonably disturb.

David

 

[David Halfpenny]

Then again, there's Cheating.
Movie technician Zoe Topper "re-located" my photo from England to Colorado, remarking that the trick is careful matching of the lighting:





Loco: Aster Hobbies, Paint job: Brian Coldicott, Railroad: Graham Harding

 

[andrew60]

Now where was I - so back to the garden railway construction.....
Maybe some people can produce absolutely level concrete over considerable lengths but mine inevitably has slight surface variations especially where two sections meet. The track also needs a base which performs two functions: 1) as a means of further levelling out both lengthways and across, and 2) so that a depth can be created for ballasting. I originally trialled 12mm thick cement board, but once ballasted up to the sleeper top, this would produce the sort of deep ballasting reminiscent of the modern high speed railway. Mine is more Cornish main line in the late 1960s, so I settled on 6mm cement board, cut in sections and segmented on curves. For some reason it started to warp when left out on the concrete base (even when dry), so for the later phases I have changed to 'Marmox' board, which doesn't warp and can be cut much more easily with a Stanley knife, and around continuous curves. The pictures show the first phase with the cement board, which was stuck down using a silicone adhesive ('No More Nails' waterproof), which stopped the board from warping. I found a digital level (the black and red box thingy in the pic) especially helpful in picking up what the eye doesn't see in terms of levelling side to side, whereas a long spirit level was used to keep things as level as possible along the length. The particular issue to guard against with finescale running is high spots (same as on the real railway), and especially on the outer rail of curves.



The track was cut and shaped before the cement board was stuck down, to establish the alignment. If shaped correctly it should find it's own level, and effectively is another 'layer' of levelling refinement on top of the cement board. I won't go into the detail of track laying - see Cliff Barker's website for all the possible information needed. Suffice to say that the use of superelevation wedges was especially important to create that smooth flow of trains traversing curves. I've seen too many layouts in all scales where trains lurch around un-canted curves at high speed in a thoroughly un-prototypical manner!



With a train on the track, I was content with the depth created for future ballasting....

Nice van (modified Fred Phipps kit, so far not weathered or lettered), but my attention started to turn to how to deal with those shiny rail sides prior to ballasting - of which more anon.

 

[bambuko]

Question, please
Concrete is fine left outside, but... is steel framework rusting going to be a problem?

 

[andrew60]

Question, please
Concrete is fine left outside, but... is steel framework rusting going to be a problem?

Not in my lifetime, I think. The steel is fairly thick and I've painted it with rust-protecting black paint since the picture above, so I think the most that should be needed is maybe some touching up over the years.

 

[bambuko]

Not in my lifetime, I think...

thanks