Innehållsförteckning för April 2025 från Garden Rail

If you like to run a variety of loads on your railway, adding some bolster wagons really does open up the options. Big logs, bundles of sticks, tubes and girders can all add interest if you have purpose-made bolsters such as these from Model Earth. I have long been a fan of the various wagons in the Model Earth Budget range for my 7/8ths scale estate railway, but while at the Exeter show, I happened to see a 16mm loco, a Katie I think, hauling a fine train of the Budget 7/8ths coal wagons and they looked great. So, as I was building two sets for my railway, I thought I would see how these look with my Katie. The bolsters are sold in pairs and come from the studio…

One of the many things that attracted me to this hobby is how diverse it is. It also attracts a broad church of individuals. Some love just to run trains. Others have no interest in that, but are very content building kits. I know people who focus on their permanent way and are more than happy with a railway on stilts. Others are more interested in accessorising their layout. I suspect I fall into this category. I like to see a railway infrastructure as a reason for a railway to be there in the first place. It does not need to be too complex: the odd passenger here and there, a telephone box or post box perhaps. A couple of milk churns or a little platform furniture all help to…

LGB announced its new ‘High-end’ Harz Mallet locos in the 2024 catalogue and a long list of features accompanied by some real-life photographs and computer-generated images of the models. Three were promised; 99 5901 in HSB black, 99 5902 in HSB green and 99 5902-4 in post-1971 DR black. Having seen the green one during a trip to the Harz in 2018, I opted for that one. Built between 1897 and 1901 for the newly formed meter gauge Nordhausen Wernigerode Eisenhahn (NWE), a fleet of nine of these locos was built by Arn Jung and latterly another three by Maschinen und Waggonbau. They were distinctive compound Mallet-type engines featuring a fixed outside frame 0-4-0 chassis with high-pressure cylinders under the cab and an articulated inside frame 0-4-0 chassis with lower-pressure…

My garden railway has no prototype; it’s not based on an existing light railway company. I simply call it the ‘Hydrangea Field Railway’, or HFB for short, because it runs around my wife’s hydrangea bed. A Feldbahn, is the German term for a narrow-gauge field railway. These are not usually open to the public but provide transportation of agricultural, forestry (Waldbahn) and industrial raw materials such as wood, peat, stone, earth and sand. I have been building model field railways since 1993. At first, I worked in the scales 1:64 (S scale), 1:120 (TT), 1:160 (N) and 1:87 (HO). Narrow gauge railways have existed in HO for many years, but in 1993, I saw a magazine article on converting a HO chassis and the construction of a beautiful layout in…

The Archangel ‘Jack’, which I described in Garden Rail 367, was a pioneer of 16mm coal firing, but driving it was not for the faint-hearted. Although there were a few skilled specialist model engineers like Hugh Saunders who built coal-fired locos, they were only made to special order. In the early 1990s, Shawe Steam Services was well known in Gauge 1 and the larger model engineering scales for high-quality work and John Shawe decided to offer a coal-fired conversion of a commercially available 16mm loco. His first venture was a rebuild of a Merlin Mayflower, which he called ‘Black Diamond’, and although it ran well, it was quite small, and John wanted to build a larger loco with a tender. After investigating the quality of the model engineering, he decided…

I have always had a soft spot for smaller locos, plus a long-time interest in the equipment of the War Department Light Railways of WW1, some of which found further use on British Narrow Gauge lines after the war. The outcome of an announcement by Boot Lane that they was to release a kit for the little McEwan Pratt (Baguley) 677 type, was inevitable, and I wandered home from the Llanfair show with yet another box emblazoned with its logo. Truth be told, this loco had been on my to-do-list since the mid 1980’s - I don’t like to rush things! I had found a simple sketch in WJK Davies book Light Railways of the First World War, copied the drawing and filed it. Several components had been sourced in…

Spring will be well and truly here by the time you read this, we’ll hopefully be back running trains in our gardens, so what better place to draw inspiration than the National Garden Railway Show at the Stoneleigh Park, Warwickshire, on Saturday, April 12th. We’re building on the vibrant 2024 show with a few changes. Member-to-Member Sales, the place for narrow gauge bargains, has moved into the main hall, leaving the Foyer available for check-in. All attractions are now in one space. We have 67 exhibitors this year, representing the full colours of the narrow-gauge railway spectrum, plus a huge 17 layouts and two static exhibits of narrowgauge garden railway models. We’ve got more small layouts this year, six are less than 10 metres square, showing what’s possible on a…

Pickering & Co. of Wishaw was established in 1888 as general engineers hiring out, and repairing rolling stock. By 1911, the firm had expanded into the business of manufacturing the carriages and wagons for railway companies that most enthusiasts will know them for. As such, they advertised widely and tendered for many contracts, both in the UK and abroad. One unsuccessful tender was to build brake vans for the Cambeltown and Machrihanish Light railway in Scotland. The only product of this was a single drawing, but the firm did produce similar vans for the Welshpool and Llanfair railway. Bole Laser Craft was formed a good deal later and has taken this drawing, turning it into a 16mm scale kit. With its outside framing, the vehicle shares much with the later…

Details Specification: • Two cylinder steam engine direct drive, self-starting • Cylinder bore: Ø 10mm • Teflon piston • Stroke: 14mm • Wheels electrically insulated • Flame tube burner • Operating pressure: 3 bar • Pressure gauge up to 6 bar • Weight: 2.4kg Optional parts: 25427 Diamond Stack 25403 Headlamp 20209 Whistle kit Dimensions: Length: 360mm, Width: 108mm, Height: 140mm Gauge: Both the locomotive and the tender can be regauged from 45mm to 32mm Price: Locomotive and tender: $1,500, Headlamp: $54 Diamond Stack: $50 Website: www.regner-dampftechnik.com REGNER ‘Niklas’ generic live steam RTR locomotive G scale For 2025, Regner again looks to an American design to expand the Easy Line models. ‘Niklas’ is a generic 0-4-0 locomotive with a small tender. While not a specific locomotive, ‘Niklas’ aims to capture the…

I’m in the slightly paradoxical position of being someone who enjoys making garden-scale models but doesn’t yet have a garden railway on which to run them, meaning I also haven’t got anywhere to photograph my creations either. In the past, I’ve made do with laying track straight in flower beds, then moved on to laying rails on planks with a tiny bit of scenic detailing. This has evolved to the point I’m at now, where I’ve built something that’s part way between a photographic set and a micro layout… Planks one and two The first two photoplanks were built not long after we moved into our new-build house, which didn’t have much of a garden, and described last month, so I won’t repeat myself. Lessons were learned, though. To make…

This first view of the Ambledown Valley Railway is clearly taken in the spring. Although most of the structure is provided by dwarf evergreens, there are also some deciduous trees, which lose their leaves in winter. The specimens providing blossom time on the AVR are of the dwarf flowering cherry Prunus incisa ‘Kojo-no-mai’. This small tree is readily available now. It provides a perfect miniature example of a flowering cherry to brighten up the railway scene. It forms a dense shrubby tree with zig-zagging branches. In early spring, the pink buds open to produce white flowers tinged with pink. Buy the tree small and keep in check by pruning after it has flowered in early summer. If you prune in spring, you will remove the flowers. This is useful to…

Since being featured in Garden Rail September 2019, there have been big changes to the South Bucks. Firstly, the Pandemic gave me an opportunity to stay at home and extend and improve the line. Some of the old buildings were replaced with 16mm/ft items, which fitted the size of the rolling stock much better than the previous G scale stuff. G scale always seem to me to not be a scale at all, but encompasses all sorts of rubber ruler scales. It also gave me the chance to install solar lighting in the buildings and to improve the battery operation of the locos. Send us your pics We always welcome pictures from our readers of their garden lines, as well as any modelling projects you are working on. Please email…

Write in and share your ideas with other enthusiasts Letters are welcomed on any aspect of large scale railway modelling. Please email the Editor: phil.parker@warnersgroup.co.uk or post to The Editor, Garden Rail Magazine, Warners Group Publications, West Street, Bourne, Lincolnshire, PE10 9PH. Which locomotive changed your world? Regarding the article in October’s issue about the toy that changed the world, I would say that it wasn’t the Bachmann Big Hauler, if anyone got people into garden railways, it was LGB! They were manufacturing in the very early 1970s. I was building garden railways in 1975, using LGB, not Bachmann. I would never have started with Bachmann, as its mechanism was very average. Peter Franks Editor: The title of Chris New’s article, ‘The Toy Train that Changed the World’, might have involved…