One of our first thoughts when we moved in to our house was where to put the train garden? We live in an old farmhouse sans the farm. When the farmland itself was sold off something that went with it was any sort of a back yard. One side of the house is taken up with the driveway and a couple of large pecan trees. The other side yard is pretty expansive, but half of it is where the drain field for our septic system lay. So if we were to have trains the front of the house is was. Fortunately we have a very big front yard.
Once we received our (first) order of track we planned on having an outer loop of about 25′ by 40′. We laid the track down and started running trains.
The first thing Archie said was “not big enough. Make it bigger”. So Sophie made it bigger.
Archie was not impressed. Apparently what he meant was to make the layout itself larger. We we added more straight sections to it and ended with a loop about 35′ by 65 ‘. And it was declared good. Now our ICE train really had some room to run.
After we ordered more track to replace what we had re-allocated to the outer loop we put down the center loop…
…and realized it was going to be very hard to keep the grass mowed.
There are many different ways that people create a garden train layout, just setting the track on the lawn and leaving it at that isn’t actually one of them. At least not long term, we did leave the track like this for a couple weeks while we acclimated our minds to the fact that a significant portion of our new front yard was going to be a train layout.
An elevated layout is popular with the live steam crowd as it allows you to keep the track very level and flat, but you end up with very little scenery or greenery. And the “garden” part of garden trains was as important to us as the trains themselves. Another, and maybe most common, method was to build a raised bed system where the track is elevated and then everything backfilled around it to bring the ground level up to the track. Like the elevated tracks this has the advantage of bringing everything up to a height where you don’t have to get down on the ground as much.
We decided we going to build a ground level layout, for several reasons. One is the fact that at 35′ by 65′ feet you are not going to be able to reach much of the track or garden from the border anyway so you have to get into it. Another factor in our decision is that at over 2200 square feet to raise it all even just a foot would require a LOT of backfill material and topsoil. And that was both an expense we couldn’t really afford and a lot of labor we didn’t care to invest. It would also have added an element of time to the construction and as our railroad was going into the front yard we didn’t want to have it looking like a disaster area for an extended period of time.
There are a few negatives to our approach that we have to live with. One is that a ground level layout may or may not actually be level. Ours is not. Were we live was actually reclaimed from the Great Dismal Swamp many years ago and without adequate drainage it would happily return to be a swamp, so our yard has a very slight slope. It’s not anything we really have to worry about but for other people thinking about this type of layout it could be a concern. And in our yard it looks like there were once at least a few trees. Once we get started the underground remains may be a concern.
Dismal Creek Railroad 