Still More Developments From Grant

Grant's Railroad Progress

Part Two

As promised, here is the second segment from yesterday's initial posting showcasing Grant's developments on the north end of his railroad. 

To visit Part One, simply copy and paste the link below into your computer's browser (or select the posting in the blog archive in the righthand column).

https://gardenrailroadottawa.blogspot.com/2021/06/more-devlopments-from-grant.html

This image was taken from Grant's earlier efforts in the spring.

(Click on the image to enlarge it and click outside to reduce.)

This was the image we left you with yesterday demonstrating the alignment of turnouts and the placement of rocks on the North Loop.

This is Grant's drawing of the south loop located near to the house.  You will remember that Grant worked on this area in an earlier posting last month.  The green arrow takes you off the drawing in the direction of the Northern Loop. 

We follow the green arrow to find where the trackage joining the southern loop enters the northern loop territory.

Once the wood sub road bed is in place, the track can be screwed down in place. The trestle on the right is the track from the Southern Loop.

As expected, as soon as we could, we ran a train onto the new trackage.  Here the work train brings a load of ties for the track gang.

View of the same train at track level from the trestle.

The back half of the loop took on a more free flowing alignment to add visual interest.  For this section we used Micro Engineering aluminum flex track.

Here is the sub road bed assembled, in place and ready for track.

We chose to recycle the Micro Engineering track from the earlier version of the North Loop. The original plan was to re-bend the assembled sections of track but we soon learned that wouldn’t work and it was best to remove the ties and start fresh. It took quite a few hours to pull the track apart as the ties/spikes were a tight fit on the rails to start with then add many years of outdoor weathering to compound the situation. Here are the rail sections ready to be repurposed.

A long thin piece of one inch pine was used as a flexicurve to draw the track centre line after which the flex track was bent, assembled and screwed in place following this line.

We are now able to run a train around the back of the loop and around the curve to the front of the garden.

Before we completed the loop trackage, we chose to turn our focus onto the garden once again.  The garden required numerous wheel barrow loads of dirt to bring it up to the final height as well as a number of large rocks had to be rolled into the space.  All of this was easier to accomplish without having to cross railroad tracks.

We could now complete the switch ladder leading up to the passing track.  Here David carefully positions the track pieces and screws them in place.

The sub road bed for the mainline in front of the station is completed.

The fore mentioned flexi curve is used to draw the track's centre line then the Micro Engineering flex track is installed.

Finally, we can run a train around the loop!  In fact, we dropped our tools at this point and spent a few hours running trains around the full railroad - through both the North and South loops!

We then installed the sub road bed for the station's passing track as well as the stub siding followed with the installation of the trackage.  We have now completed the track laying phase of the operation.  There will be a future branch to a mining district but that will materialize at a later date.

Small rocks (from around the property) and half-inch gravel (from the hardware store) were carefully installed along the right of way.  Any track alignment issues were addressed at this time through careful tamping of the ballast.

Plastic garden edging was used to separate the ballast from the garden dirt. These stakes were removed once the ground materials were firmly in place.

This completes the major railroad construction that was scheduled for this year. Moving forward I will be assisting the Gardener with relocating and adding new plants.  I need to design and build the station and would like to add some town related structures to the railroad. If time and enthusiasm allows, the mine extension may be built this year too.

I hope you have enjoyed reading about my 2021 garden rail road project.  Grant

Your garden railroad is progressing in a magnificent fashion, Grant.  Thanks so much for sharing your wonderful images and captions with us.  We are looking forward to more developments in the near future!

All the best, Mike Hamer, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada