Building my permenant railway

[DolwyddelanLightRail]

Over half term (next week) I am going to start servaying the area that I would like my railway to start, and begin to build the first stage of my railway at the bottom of the garden!!!!!
YAY!!!!!
I'll put a pic of the long strech where it's going to start soon[/img]

[PCLR]

are you going to have a loop or a end to end line ???

[Dr. Bond of the DVLR]

Or an end to end with a balloon at one or both ends?

[DolwyddelanLightRail]

well, it looks like at the mo that i am going to just have a strip of line with the amount of track i have currently
hopefully i should start off with a steam up area with a dead end, and then a balloon loop around 100 metres away down a dead straight piece of line

phase 2 is where part of the line splits off to slowly crawl up the side of the garden (which is incledibly steep)

I'll put pics up of the proposed line to run next week when i'm home next

[Dr. Bond of the DVLR]

for the slow crawl up the garden are you going to use a zig zag format?

[DolwyddelanLightRail]

yup, hopefully just 2, and hopefully it should involve a tunnel that will be actually carved out of a solid piece of slate rock outcrop!

[Dr. Bond of the DVLR]

oo er! Good luck! A peice of 16mm scale tunneling equptment would mak ean interesting model!

[DolwyddelanLightRail]

i was thinking that, but the most likely thing thats going to happen is that i'm going to borrow dads big big big big big big power drill thingy! which goes through anything you want it to

but it taken a while!

[mhlr]

Super! You could draw a track plan and post it up here!

If you decide to change to narrow gauge track but using your current standard gauge stuff too, this could be useful? (Not my diagram).

[Dr. Bond of the DVLR]

Yup that works. All I did to join a piece of 10mill 16mm scale flexy track (45mm gauge) to my 10mm scale track was raise the 10 mm scale track up a bit and pinch the fish plates in! I am removing 1/3rd of all my sleepers to narrowgaugeify my line by cutting the plastic ties joining the sleepers togethor on the back, removing a third and then glueing them after respacing them (at slightly wonkey angles!)

[DolwyddelanLightRail]

thanks a lot for your help, i'll try to post a track plan sometime, if i get any time!

[DolwyddelanLightRail]

Update

Tomorrow, I am dragging the parents down to the bottom of the garden, and telling them where it's going.
For a trackbed, i'm constructing it mainly out of bricks, what I am going to do is dig down one brick depth, and build up two walls parrelell to each other, bout 2-3 inches apart, roughly 1 ft high.

If I get anytime, i'll fill the gap with concrete (which I doubt I will have any time for!), if not, i'll use something else, don't know what yet!

The only problem is that there has been a sudden increase in mole activity there, and i'm worried that i'm going to get it perfectly flat, then once i'm at school, it'll make it subside

Any tips that I may need to help?

[mhlr]

UpdateIf I get anytime, i'll fill the gap with concrete (which I doubt I will have any time for!), if not, i'll use something else, don't know what yet!

Fine gravel? The track needs to be secured by something though, maybe wooden battons in the gravel which the track is screwed to?

Regarding the moles, if you build your trackbed substantial enough, it should be fine as they don't dig massive holes. And if it does... well it'll be a real mine shaft! "Mole Mine Co."

[DolwyddelanLightRail]

haha, Instead of the Dolwyddelan Quarry Line, Dolwyddelan Mole Line!

But they have dug into the greenhouse somehow (which has a concrete foundation!) which is the main worry!

I was thinking of fine gravel, or I could part fill it in, and then place a brick on it's side to have the track to secure to?

[Dr. Bond of the DVLR]

I'd like to suggest that a fine balast would be better as you can edit your track layour. Also balasting on top of a surface to which the sleepers are directly laid ontop of can be troublesom in my opinion as the stones allways end up in the flangeways....
As to the moles just build your railway to withstand them there really is littler other way of getting around the problem humanely...

[DolwyddelanLightRail]

I think I will just let and live die really, I don't want to kill them so i'll leave them

The only main problem I can see is that I am going to have the odd archway in the foundations, the support for the track will be made out of old thick slating roof tiles

[mhlr]

As to the moles just build your railway to withstand them there really is littler other way of getting around the problem humanely...

Trust me, they're bu**ers to kill anyway! At the place in Anglesey we used to have, my dad used to stand really still over patch of grass where they'd come up, with a spade, awaiting for them to appear so he could then play the real life version of that fun fair game... and he never got one. Called up the pest control, and being Welsh, the guy shoved a pipe down one of the mole hills, attach the other end to his van's exhaust, and give it a good revving. The neighbours wondered why our lawn was smoking for days after... Still didn't work.

[DolwyddelanLightRail]

we've had them before, but they all just dissapeared as quickly as they came, which was quite weird, but my primary school teacher was always trying to catch the moles on the playing field, ohe only caught one int he whole 3 years I was there!
But that's another story
should get a pic of the proposed site tomorrow!

[SillyBilly]

I saw some thing on TV once where the bloke just stuck explosives in the holes and blew them up, it was expensive, but I think it worked.

[DolwyddelanLightRail]

I would rather not do that really, as I would like my garden in one piece!