Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2023 i Garden Rail

SEASON’S GREETINGS OK, you’re reading this in November, and I’m writing it in October, but this is the December issue, so time to mention the C word – Christmas. Us modellers are both difficult and simple to buy presents for. Difficult because the things we really want, as opposed to a pair of socks with steam trains on, are made by companies that most people have never heard of. Easy, because there are so many interesting things that we’d be delighted to find under the tree. Who doesn’t wish to increase their collection of laser-cut wagons? Plenty of scope there, for gifts in all price ranges. Just ignore the reminders that last year’s gifts are still in their packing… This is where Garden Rail can help. Casually leave issues lying…

It all started from a love of Lego and trains. I grew up in England and loved playing and building with the famous plastic bricks, and always wanted an actual Lego train, but was never able to get my hands on a set. Fast forward 33 years, and I find myself with a cabin in the mountains just outside Los Angeles, in a village charmingly named Arrowbear. I had just finished a remote control off road track with my girlfriend on another part of my property, which included two flower gardens and a water feature. In that I added a waterlily and 13 Goldfish, all named Fred. After this, I couldn’t stop thinking about the other corner of my piece of land, my love of trains, Lego, and how pretty…

It’s been a long time since the construction of my No.1 locomotive was described in Garden Rail April 2011. I blame the decision to sell our house, move 300 miles, and buy our next home, which took several years. Once we had settled in North Devon, work began on the garden, building a pergola, flower beds, two footpaths and planting a row of cordon apple trees. Apart from a crab apple tree along the back fence, and an acer tree a few feet in front of it, the last six foot was waiting to be finished. There, I thought, I could manage to get an oval of track into the nine-feet length available. A start was made, but with a slope of about one foot over the length, a surrounding…

In the most recent edition of Garden Rail, there was a very short article about scratch-built G scale trams modelled on the Belgian tram system. Though not a part of the hobby I have ever been interested in, I found the trams themselves fascinating and a credit to the skills of the builders. The description talks about the trams as well as trailers and wagons, which had also been scratch-built. Sadly, there were no pictures of these vehicles either on their own or coupled to the trams. Is there any chance of more pictures, but this time including trailers and wagons? On another subject, as a matter of course, I remove any springs from items that are about to be ditched and then store them in the ‘come in handy’…

A pre-production Regner Guinness locomotive was on show, and Graham Austin allowed the Editor to have a good look. It’s a weighty little beast, and very simple, with excellent access to the driving controls. There appears to be provision for radio control, although we aren’t quite sure how this will be connected. Looks lovely though, very tempting. Running on Melin Lechi, this little loco is based on a HGLW chassis. Owner Jack Knowles tells us the body is inspired by locos produced in large numbers by Greenwood and Batley in Leeds. The Leeds Industrial Museum has a real one, but he’s not been able to find any more. Can a Garden Rail reader help? Rod Nipper stuck a camera on a pole to capture this overall view, showing part of…

As a kid, I spent hours flipping through the handful of LGB catalogues I had. It wasn’t the products themselves that enticed me, but the images the garden railways people created. My collection was small but I’d do my best to create aspects of them with the track and stock I had. The curves were tighter, the siding emptier and the buildings required a bit more imagination, but I still had a lot of fun. My head was always filled with different ideas of what my layout could grow into one day. Two decades later, in 2021, that childhood dream came true when my wife Nikki and I moved to Jersey and broke ground on the HSBA Garden Railway. This is our story. Let’s start with a few key stats…

The complex we were staying at in Madeira had a library where you could exchange the book you had been reading while travelling for someone else’s travelling diversion. Among the books on offer was America’s Railroad, The Official Guidebook by Robert T. Royem, which was the history and museum guide of the Durango & Silverton narrow gauge railroad. I borrowed the book, which was a very interesting read. One of the chapters it described the lines ‘Galloping Geese’; road vehicles converted to run on rails. One of the illustrations showed the first ‘Galloping Goose’ made, which used a Buick touring car as a base vehicle. This conversion took place in 1931 at Ridgeway on the 3-foot gauge Rio Grande Southern Railroad and it was used as an inexpensive way to…

Part of the raison d’être for my Newton and Southlands Tramway (NST) is the fishing industry – the railway is a narrow gauge branch, somewhere in Northumberland, connecting the small fishing port of Southlands Sluice to the main line railway at Newton, and the fishing lobby was key in getting it built in the first place. In the early 20th century, North Sea fishing took a variety of forms, changing with the seasons. From late October through the winter, there was long line fishing; in the spring there was potting for crab and lobster, and then, from late June or early July onwards, through to the autumn, there was herring drifting. The latter was a significant industry, with fleets of boats following the herring shoals as they moved south over…

Steam Power It was great to see that Greg Ohm enjoyed my article on steam locomotive power, and so sorry to disappoint. The weight a locomotive can haul on a flat track is proportional to friction, either in the bearings (Garden Rail Sept 2020), or friction from the track (Garden Rail March 2021), hence our locomotives do not need to be very powerful. In other words, if you want to haul a bigger load improve the bearings. For interest, the weight of my house brick is 2.2kg, but the truck has a brake to increase the friction and enable me to find the maximum drawbar load and maximum power. Of course, everything is different if you want to haul a train uphill, but then someone else can do the maths.…

A chance schlep through a well-known auction site provided me with a cheap and cheerful G scale modern image coach at very good price from East Coast Railway. I was on the lookout for some modern image because, with my fevered imagination of an alternative world, the forerunner of the Welsh Highland Railway, the Portmadoc Beddgelert and South Snowdon Railway has survived as an electric railway, running from Beddgelert up to Capel Curig and on to Betws y Coed. This was originally a proposal by The North Wales Narrow Gauge Railways Company, and, in my imagination, it became part of the PBSSR, running in conjunction with the WHR. My imagination also allowed me the possibility that during the Colonel Stevens period, he might have bought two Crochat Autorails as an…

Now, I am ashamed to say that I am one of those obsessive people who wear a fitness watch. Quite why I need my wristwatch to tell me that my heart is beating, that I can walk, and whether I have had a good night’s sleep is a mystery, but I am able to confirm, to the nearest calorie, that a day of garden railwaying is equivalent to a work out in the gym. Just walking back and forward to the workshop during a day’s steaming easily achieves the obligatory 10,000 steps, and a bit of grass cutting, weeding, or lifting soon achieves the daily 20 minutes of cardio. The bending, twisting and balancing required to keep my railway open is all good exercise, and, in the past, I thought…

BOOT LANE WORKS 16mm scale Double Fairlie kit - ‘Eternal Star’ Released at the Yorkshire Garden Railway Show, this locomotive kit is Boot Lane’s interpretation of the Ffestiniog Railway’s, Double Fairlie locomotive, ‘Little Wonder’, built by George England in 1869. The model comes complete with two power bogie kits (in either 32mm or 45mm gauge) and is built from 3D-printed filament and resin parts, laser-cut acrylic utilising the companies’ adaption of the Binnie Engineering 29mm wheel, creating a practical driving wheelset. It is supplied with two 3-6volt motors, nylon worm gears, Binnie Engineering 29mm wheels on ⅛” stainless steel axles, and all necessary metal stock, nuts, screws & washers required to build the model in the photos. Also included in the kit is a micro slide switch (with a corresponding…