Four years of work in the garden on weekends, mornings and evenings.
2017
I had spent a LOT of time beating back both ivy and wild iris from the yard. Both are very invasive and occupied hundreds of square feet of our garden. So in 2017 I had a plan to build a garden railroad and the beginnings of a garden.
2018
In 2018 I concentrated on clearing the land of noxious brush. I had version 1 of the plan defined, and began to lay out the primary features.
I decided to start from the top of the railroad, as the bottom needed some (expensive) retaining wall work which had to wait. So here is where Matterhorn Siding would be, the position and elevation defined.
This let me start to define the garden more clearly and to start laying out paths.
Lower path: Ophir, Low Line to the left and Ames, Vance Junction to the rightUpper path: Ophir, High Line to the right and Matterhorn to the left
2019
I spent most of 2019 working on Matterhorn and it’s attached planter bed.
Matterhorn with track and turnouts being installed
2020
2020 sees the “completion” of Matterhorn, some of the garden hardscape in place and in general a LOT of progress toward the end goal.
Flagstones and Dry-stack Retaining WallMatterhorn with decorative planters below and foliage adjacent
I also began to define Ophir and the High-line Siding, building “table” sections similar to Matterhorn. The Ophir table will have the Depot and other structures.
Ophir in the foreground and the High-line siding behind that
This winter I’ll spend a lot of time building bridges to be installed when the weather is not too wet, probably in this order:
Bridge 51-A at the end of Matterhorn
Bridge 45-B between Ophir and the High-line Siding
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 scraps can be
recycled as spacers.)
I simply glue and clamp these without any nails or screws. The addition of ties and attachment to the baseboard will bond everything together permanently.
Gluing and Nailing Ties
I have a tie-spacing template with ties drawn at 1.2” apart, which gives ten ties per foot. (This is the same as Llagas Creek flex track.) I use small snack-size zipper bags filled with sand as weights for holding the glued ties down while the glue sets. Each bag will cover five ties, so I put them down five at a time.
Once the glue has set, I use a brad nailer to attach each tie to the stringers. Make sure that each nail ends up under the rail by marking gauge lines 45 mm. apart and nailing just outside of those lines. (I thoroughly wet down the ties before I nailed them to help make sure they wouldn’t split.)
Note: I wrote this in July 2019, and since then I have found that using longer spikes holds the ties in place well, so I no longer nail the ties down. Also, sometimes the nail would end up where I wanted a spike!
Spiking Rail
I start spiking rail down by placing the length on the ties
with a straight-edge and spiking it down in just a few places – say every foot.
Then I carefully spike in between those spots, dividing each into halves and so
forth until the rail is spiked every two or three ties.
The second rail needs to be spiked in gauge, so I break out
my track gauges and put one on each side of the tie I’m spiking. For this rail,
I spike the same ties as on the first rail.
At this point I just proceed spiking the remaining ties from one end to the other.
Curved Stringers
I made a curved track jig to use to laminate three pieces per side of bender board or lathe cut to ¾” width. I use the same spacers as for the straight stringers. In hindsight, I realized that I could have used fewer spacers on this first curved piece (perhaps using many as construction spacers and not gluing them).
I drew a template with LibreCad (CAD software of choice because it’s free) and used that to position the ties similar to the straight section process.
(This post was mostly written a year ago. I was embarrassed when I looked at the last update to this blog! I’ll add a few more posts, because I have photos from the construction process.)
During the past year, I have begun the construction of my garden railway. After we had cleaned up after snowpocolypse, that is. I decided to start at the top of the yard, because the bottom section is waiting on a retaining wall project. The topography of my land means that this section is elevated about 4 feet off the ground, so I elected to build a “table” for this section.
The table is the portion labeled Matterhorn with the siding. Just after the top end of the table is Bridge 51A, the Trout Lake trestle to be built and installed this year.
Matterhorn Section
I used standard treated wood 2×4 frames covered with hardware cloth and then weed barrier cloth on top of that.
Because this section will be elevated close to eye-level, I thought that hand-laying the track would look nicest.
I was looking at this and thought that it would be great to have some elevated garden boxes along the table so I could plant on this section of the line as well as the filled ground-level sections. So I built a long raised plant box along the back of the table.
It’s surprising just how much dirt and mulch it takes to fill this!I took my time and built a nice cedar face for this planter, as it will be visible from the upper patio.
I am looking forward to better weather as I have a lot of little
projects to finish this section: one turnout and the final curve needs to be finished;
all the track needs to be fastened down; the siding area needs to be filled and
ballasted; and the garden box filled and planted. Also, a trestle to build and
install just off the end of the table.
Not being a glutton for punishment, track laying will then
continue apace using PVC ladder roadbed and flex track.
