by Mel

I suppose the WGLR (Mk 1)'s zenith was appearing on the cover of the March 2010 edition of Garden Rail.

 

But the truth was that the town section of the railway was always built as a temporary measure. I always had it in mind that the time was fast approaching when I would attempt a major re-build of our garden focusing on the area that included the town section. Also (partially as a result of the bodged building of the temporary baseboards), the running qualities of this section were never good enough for my liking. The bend on the town side of the girder bridge did not flow properly (it always reminded me a bit of a tame version of The Mouse big dipper at Skegness), the little kink in the track at the end of the road crossing caused problems (ironically with the smaller 0-4-0 loco's) and the bend leading to the junction for Gooey Station caused many derailments (especially for trains running anti-clockwise). Another problem was that the right-hand side of the railway (as seen in the accompanying track plans) was in the shadow of a large apple tree. This led to a number of problems namely, sap on the track during the blossom season, the town section getting "bombed" to destruction when the apples dropped in early Autumn and the usual issue of a massive leaf drop a few weeks later.

 

And so it was decided that 2010 would be the year of the big re-build. This would involve demolishing 2 of our 3 aviaries (some of the birds would be housed together, some would need re-homing), having the apple tree cut down, the building of a very large new flower bed/rockery and a complete re-design of the Gooey town side of the railway.

 

Here is the old track plan;

 

 

The new track plan would incorporate a new Gooey terminus station, a repersentation of the "real" Welshpool narrows section, a set of sidings serving a (yet to be decided) industrial or military site, a section of track running in a rural environment (through the rockery) and one of Cain Howley's brilliant concrete viaducts.

 

Having sorted out the needs of our birds, work could start on the re-build. Of course, before you can build things, you have to clear the site. First job was to clear the track. Remember the cover picture of Garden Rail with the Spreewald crossing the bridge? Well here it is with the track lifted.

 

 

RAF Ffynon Garew also lost it's rail connection.

 

 

The former site of Gooey Station.

 

 

And the old town section with those dodgy temporary baseboards.

 

Of course, in one way this was all very sad seeing a couple of years work being reduced to a box-full of bits and pieces ...

 

 

....... but the prospect of a new, bigger railway is good motivation and it did result in some pleasing improvements to the existing Wetton side of the railway as the buildings that used to make-up Railway Terrace to the rear of Gooey Station were re-located to the rear of Wetton Yard.

 

 

I should point out that I have contemplated re-building the Wetton side of the railway with it's loop, maybe getting rid of one of the links to the main circuit to change the station into a terminus (which is what it should be really), but I've decided to leave it as it is for the following reasons;

1) The loop was the only railway I had when I first went out into the garden nearly 4 years ago, so it has sentimental memories.

2) If I changed Wetton to a terminus, I would need to put a passing loop in somewhere else in order to allow trains to cross - which would mean that one of the other features that I wanted to incorporate would have to be dropped.

3) When I run trains "realistically", Wetton also becomes the through stations at Pant-Glas Road and Cockshutt Mortimer. Over the years this has become a very useful operational feature on a railway which is built in such a small area.

And finally,

4) I really like it - which is perhaps the most important thing IMO.

One other big advantage of this decision is that I'm still able to run trains while the re-build is going on. OK, only in a very limited way, but that's still a means of keeping your spirits up when the building work seems to be an uphill struggle.

 

With all the track lifted, the baseboards were next to go and then it was the big job of demolishing the two doomed aviaries. Hard work, but a bigger reward as the garden suddenly appeared to grow. Getting rid of all the rubbish was the next hurdle. Skip hire quotes proved to be ridiculous (I wanted to borrow one, not buy it outright), so a day had to be set aside to load all the remains into the car for repeated runs to the local tip.

 

Here's what the garden looked like after a weeks hard graft.

 

 

The dark gravel bed to the left is the former site of Gooey Station. The lighter gravel in the centre used to be under the town section. Immediately behind these two beds can be seen the footprint of one of the demolished aviaries. The other one was to the left of the shed/bird room. The remaining aviary (which will be re-built next year) is in the background.  Wetton is just out of shot to the right.

 

And here is how the new plan fits into things. Please note, this is looking in the opposite direction to the previous track plans and is very much a mock-up and in no way accurate!

 

More progress today. The walling is now complete, just requiring cementing in place. I've also been heavily involved in digging, starting to get that grassy knoll (used to be the rabbit run) leveled out to fill the bed. However, this can't be done properly until the walling is finished and I can't do that until I've got the Cain Howley viaduct to make sure I get the levels correct. So I'll be on the phone to Back2Bay6 ASAP in the morning.

I even got a bit of track out to make sure that it would fit inside the walling. If you check out the new trackplan, you will recognise that this section will lead into the road crossing and Welshpool narrows - which ran through a coppice of trees ........... now there's an idea????

Hopefully, the cement foundations will gain a nice coat of moss with time. We still have a couple of piers on back-order, hence the reason that the girder bridge (the LGB one that featured on the cover of GR with a new coat of paint) is temporarily resting on bricks. With the viaduct in place, the rest of the walling around the new bed can now be cemented in place.

If you look at the new track plan, you will see that a series of storage sidings was included in the far corner of the garden. The original plan was to build a wooden deck type baseboard for these sidings, but the completion of the paving resulted in 5 2 foot square slabs being left over. So I came up with this idea. Very much a mock-up at this stage, but it will certainly be strong enough, won't rot and cost absolutely nothing. I'm hoping that the finished base will be 4 slabs long rather than 3..

A real light at the end of the (metaphoric) tunnel moment.