Hand-laying Track Straight Stringers I rip cheap cedar fence boards into ¾” wide pieces, getting four per board. The height of my stringers will be ¾”, so I use the clean-cut sides as the top-bottom. I glue two of these together and cut 1-inch blocks to act as spacers between the straight stringers. (Any stringer […]
Building the Matterhorn “table” section At the high end of the railroad, the elevation above the ground makes it prohibitive to build a retaining wall, so I am going to use a table to elevate the tracks. Conventional construction of two 10-foot long, 2-feet wide sections. I’m using treated lumber for everything structural. I got […]
Survey and Layout Now that I have gotten closer to civilizing the yard, I started to lay out the garden railroad. I started by putting in stakes every 20 feet to correspond with my plan. Using ground marking paint, I painted lines between those stakes. Here, the yard is more under control, and I have […]
I have been working for a couple of years to get a long-neglected part of my yard in shape to build a new garden railroad. About three years ago, I began to use herbicide to eradicate the massive amount of ivy that had taken over a couple thousand square feet of the yard. This is […]