The Acer Line (Working Title)

[gham89]

Long time lurker and jealous of my old man's G-Scale garden railway, I finally decided to throw something together over the last few days.

The trackbed is made from a mix of marine ply and spare decking boards I had lying around. I had originally just painted them with some textured paint, but the colour looked awful so I have bodged together a better texture using some kiln dried sand and a few layers of "water resistent" glue, we'll see if it lasts. The wood isn't fixed, but rather layed on sand to level and the gravel is essentially acting as a ballast to hold in place.

I've still to finish the out and back, plant up the rockery areas and re-add the half barrel to the circle of bricks with my potted acer. 

Had some very early testing today, hoping a first loop run will be tomorrow.

I've no doubt made some cardinal errors, but it's been fun so far, so we'll see how it lasts and make improvements/corrections when required.

[gham89]

Track laying finished today and a nice wee run round. A few rough areas I need to fix, but happy enough with how it looks.

[MarkE]

Hi There, It's so nice to see a new garden railway in the making. The one extra thing I would do while the sides of the rails are still clean, is to solder a jumper wire across each rail joint. The fishplates will probably loose their connectivity after a winter of being outside! It's so much easier to do this before the rails get dirty and you'll have much better reliable running. But don't solder the fishplates themselves as you need to allow for the expansion and contraction in hold and cold weather.

[gham89]

Thanks for the tip, Mark!

Undecided if this is the final plan, but once I'm settled I'll be sure to sort this out, and definitely before winter! 

Already seeing problems of ground level running, but nothing that can't be overcome with a little maintenance. The track bed is looking a bit rough already so will need to repaint, but again that's easy to do. 

[Andrew]

Looks great.  Hope it's holding up well.

Some ground-level photos of trains in the sunshine would look good too!