by Cheeseminer
What am I creating in the garden? Is it a model railway? Yes, but No, not really. If I was building a railway indoors I'd be building a model and most things would be to some sort of approximate scale. I would be making everything and thus have total control (well, I like to think so). In the garden I don't want to draw any hard lines between the 1:1 garden from the 1:20 railway, and that means a compromise. This waffle will explore where I find that compromise. Others will find it elsewhere. |  |
I suppose it would be fair to the reader to give some idea of the garden. Our's is a mid 30's house on an arterial road at the edge of a city. This means a long thin garden. We've lived here 20+ years (hence being able to afford it - you couldn't get a ship's biscuit these days for a price we paid for this). The garden has a number of trees - the ones that are left are mainly plum trees in a semi-regular arrangement. This used to be a fruit-growing area. Most of the garden is either lawn (green stuff that gets mown) or beds full of the sort of stuff that looks after itself. Established by us as busy DINKY's, then busy parents, effort-intensive gardening was never going to work for us however much we enjoy gardening. As an aside, we garden organically - mostly as a live-and-let-live philosophy; significantly because we eat the fruit; and partly, with the area involved, the cost would be prohibitive.
So where do I start on the railway? Actually, it's more of a case of where do I not start. I don't start 100ft off the ground in a parallel universe on stalks. I can well (indeed, at my age, increasingly) appreciate the attraction of a waist-high line but for me the railway always needed to be rooted in a broad landscape. My joy is with the modelling of the whole - and not just a thin strip either side of the tracks.
In a similar vein, I don't want to draw a distinct line between garden and railway as if I'd simply moved the model railway out of doors. If nothing else, I'd feel a bit constrained by that envelope.
Take this picture of the garden's 'shrub bed'. The track isn't immediately obvious; but when you do focus on it, its immediate surroundings look fine, and somehow you don't notice the bird bath any more. It doesn't always work this well, but that's the effect I'm after.
So, my model railway has to live with the existing trees, shrubs and so on. It also means I cannot have a 'complete' model - where I do have areas of detail such as the station and industrial areas these are essentially little, disconnected, dioramas. The resulting unnatural boundaries around each of these irks me a bit, but that's all part of the compromise I guess.
I grown to see 'past' the hugely over-scale tree trunks. The mid-sized foliage; hollies, mahonias, sumach, etc. I accept as 'impressionist' trees. At any conscious level these have ridiculously huge leaves but, by mainly keeping them in the background and some liberal cutting back, these all add good volume, colour and variety to both the garden at 1:1, and forests at 1:20.
The presence of the railway has encouraged me to do things in the garden I would never have done otherwise. 
The estuary especially holds a small range of alpine plants - a whole genre of plants I'd written off to sad collector types with too much time on their hands.
Again they are 'impresionist' at the 1:20 scale with their 2-foot-wide flowers - but a wonderful splash of colour at 1:1, which would never have had enough 'free space' as the railway and its gravelled spaces have allowed.
to be continued...
Footnotes.
1:20 ? - yes I'm not that bothered about accuracy so a mix of 1:19 and 1:20 doesn't bother me; it's just that the Flatlanders made their wagons a tad larger than the Welsh. I simply find it easier to divide by 20 in my head, than by 19.
DINKY - Dual Income, No Kids Yet.