First, let me say that this whole project was undertaken jointly with my wife, Dorinne.  She is a professional Florist and Master Gardener, so she is totally in charge of the "Garden" aspects of the project. My responsibility was for the "Railway" portion. We have done this once before, and found that dividing the labor and responsibility resulted in a better railroad, with less arguing and hurt feelings, and a lot more fun

My "vision" for this railway was to emulate the feeling of Jim Slater's Budley and Bumbledown Railway, in England, with a lonely, single, narrow gauge track meandering through the countryside.  Sometimes the foliage would be scale and sometimes it would be big fantastic plants of all kinds, flowering wildly.  Loco's and cars would be mostly 4-wheel industrial and estate stock, run on battery or steam power on home made track using brass rail on wood ties.

In the spring of 2001 we laid out what would become an elevated, chevron shaped in our new back yard, in Old Orchard Beach, Maine.  The "V" of the chevron backed up to a cluster of large white birch trees and we planned for an elevated section to extend around them.  After researching and pricing a variety of wall materials, we settled on pressure-treated lumber. We would have liked stone, but the cost and labor would have busted both our backs and our budget.

After removing the sod, we built the walls and capped them with 2X8's laid flat, to provide a built-in step, seat, workspace, and steam-up area.  Then the interior was filled with stone, rubble, and dirt from several sources.  At one end, a hill was formed from large granite rocks scavenged from a friend's woods.  Then the basic track plan, an oval with a crossover-reversing track was laid out in the dirt, and an 8" - 12" wide trench was dug about 4" - 8" deep and filled with pea-gravel to promote good drainage and form the track base.

I built the track in 4' - 6' sections with used code 197-brass rail and 7/16" X 3/4" X 4-3/4" red cedar wood ties on top of 1" X ¾" red cedar stringers in my shop.   I followed a series on track construction by Marc Horovitz in Garden Railways magazine a few years back. 

Next year, we will add some more track, a few small structures, and perhaps some other features we haven't thought of yet.

Carlo Spirito