Garden Rail Saturday; Planning the Line

Time for another instalment...

This was pretty as well as far as the old garden line got, the 45mm incarnation of it anyway, in the garden at the in-laws. As previously discussed, for a variety of reasons/excuses the line ended up an overgrown ruin and was scrapped. With the new layout underway in 32mm scale at our new house, we've been building up stock to test with. We needed a concept and theme for the layout, and started thinking about something small in scale, and vaguely Welsh in theme.

This is the sort of thing we're thinking of; small locomotives and quarry/feldbahn-sized stock. This was a gala event on the Ffestiniog a few years back, photo taken up at Tanybwlch.

A trip to the Tal-Y-Llyn this Easter provided more inspiration; moss, ferns, and rock cuttings, and dinky little locomotives.

A bit of Photoshop jiggery-pokery; one of the shots from the visit re-touched to represent a loco and coaches surviving into British Rail ownership in the 1990's. One of the ideas being toyed with is a Corris-esque line surviving through Nationalisation, in a similar fashion to the nearby Vale of Rheidol. The Corris at least has the advantage of smaller locomotives and coaches (the above Kerr Stuart is an ex-Corris machine). 

In terms of space available for a layout, however, this was the size of the area we had at the in-laws...

...versus what we have now. Not hugely inspiring in terms of what we could fit in, even going for a compact quarry-type layout. In fact it's about a quarter of the room we had the 45mm line in.

Doodling the trackplans led to this; actually working full-size, though with Faller stock to test clearances. A layout for the garden, effectively in the space you'd normally do a large indoor layout in the smaller scales!

And here is the plan, though since this was drawn-up, it's changed again a couple of times. But then that was the point of planning it so thoroughly; the 45mm layout suffered for being too big a project, and needing constant revision.

Anyway, here it is in the current issue of Garden Rail magazine; more soon, focussing on actually making a start on building the line... Though the next instalment will probably be a trip to a garden railway exhibition this weekend.