by Bradypus (Nick)

At the moment I am here under false pretences. I admit it, I haven't got a garden railway. I do, however have a big train set which appears in the garden occasionally. When the weather is inclement, like the travelling funfair, it packs up and goes into hiding, or wanders the highways and byways looking for a venue to set up and give a display.

In the beginning:

The old 32mm line had had it. 20 years at ground level, entombed in concrete and flooded every winter had given the sleepers the consistency of toffee. The frost heave had produced immovable twists and the weeds had infiltrated every crack.


Planning to move house resulted in little incentive to undertake major rebuilding and, anyway, I had finally seen the light and decided to go to 45mm gauge. Having no idea how long it would take to find a property and no idea what the garden would look like, I needed a temporary layout which could give me a quick fix of steam now and again.

I have helped to build and exhibit many small scale exhibition layouts with fellow members of the Barnsley MRC, even managing a portable 32/45mm layout. Unfortunately, after adding the scenery it became a major operation to transport and impossible to store without taking up a large chunk of the clubrooms. So, decision one for my own layout was to limit the baseboards to the width of the trackbed. The scenery would be the garden.

Decision two was to make the boards modular to fit any space available. Construction is conventional as for most small-scale model railways: 1/2in Water-and-Boil-Proof ply on 2in x 1in crossmembers.The boards are 180mm wide. Sides were added form 6mm or 3mm ply 75mm deep.  Everything was glued with waterproof PVA and screwed with self-tappers. All the wood was painted with 2 coats of Cuprinol preserver and 2 coats of heavy-build grey primer. Even so, I would only consider it "showerproof" rather than "all weather".

I made the end connections as two M10 bolts in 13mm clearance holes. By making a drill jig  which fitted between the rails, the bolts are always located relative to the track height and centre. Thus I can connect Peco to LGB to Aristocraft etc. at will, simply by using the appropriate railjoiners. The board surfaces don't line up but the bolts and rail heads always do.


Adding a few more points and an embryo station brings us to venue number 2: A small corner of the factory where I work:


I had the opportunity to try the whole layout at Barnsley exhibition in 2007 (Venue number 3). Some of the straights were transferred to the ends at 90 degrees to make a 'short, fat' layout. As some of the plants had been lifted pending a transfer to the new house, the were added as token scenery:


I managed to find a house in 2008 and moved in February 2009. 2 months later I was able to hold an Easter steamup using part of the layout raised on old bricks kindly(!) left by the builder. A simple oval at venue number 4:


The position is roughly where one end of the permanent layout will go, once the groundworks are finished. I was fortunate to find a house with a relatively large garden with a gentle slope, so in June all the boards were laid out to give the neighbours a taste of what was coming:

Straights were added into the large radius curved boards at 45 degrees and 135 degrees to make a parallelogram-oval and the 2ft radius, 90 degree boards were used to form the branch.