End of running season ....

Well with the weather closing in its the end of the outdoor running season for me. I've been enjoying the weather and running my little trains around when I fancy.

---oXo---

During August I went round to a friend's for his garden railway open evening; had great time. My little train pottering round ...

 One of my friends trains ....

 I had to leave before seeing this rather long train running,

apparently 2 more wagons were added and two diesel locos to pull it.

---oXo---

All the final pruning and tidying of the garden is now done,  the grass/wild meadow centre did well giving us a lot of wild flowers. I managed to get the grass cut during last week, there are few small bald areas which can be sorted out next spring.

There are a few jobs to sort out on the railway. The main ones are positioning of the feeds for powering the track and levelling of the track.

Grass area maturing nicely ....

The grass area in the centre has come along nicely

 although the bottom part is a bit bare, some more soil/seed required here

 The wild flower mix has started to come through as well ...

Adding some wagon loads and a guard ...

 For my cattle van I put a couple of old Schleich cows onto a base and then put that in the cattle van; can only just see the cows through the gaps in the van.

 Next up were some removable wagon loads, I made up some bases from plasticard and scribed them,

 then painted them a light grey and glued on various items barrels, boxes etc to give me some loads I can now swap out of my wagons ...

 

Lastly I made up a narrow base of card painted it as close as possible to the guards van grey and stuck on a guard (Bachmann figure), the guard on his base can removed if desired

New platform surfaces...

For  my in-door garage layout, the platforms surfaces done using Metcalfe OO scale paving  had deteriorated over the damp winter so I've replaced them with some vinyl self-adhesive tiles from Wilkinsons.

 They look much better now and are more robust to cope with the environment of the garage.

The grass is growing .....

A couple of weeks ago finally decided on what to do with the centre of the garden - have a sort of wild flower 'meadow' instead of just grass.

I put in plenty of grass seed and two boxes of wild meadow mixture as well, now we have some grass coming through in patches - obviously didn't quite get the depth of seed uniform - still it's a start

Checking running of rolling stock ....

Had some nice weather yesterday, so popped out and ran a small train of representative rolling stock to check clearances and negotiation of curves etc. Everything went Ok much to my delight.

Some photos of the train in various parts of garden layout.....

Station !

A final push yesterday got the station area ballasted, track laid and the station with associated buildings in place. Nice to have the garden railway back in place.

 View of station, showing siding ...

 Gangers check the newly laid track ....

 View showing the lineside hut and water tower...

Diesel (battery powered) approaches the station area...

I had the battery diesel running round for a while - picked up some areas of uneven track, which required a jiggle of the ballast to correct. Plenty left to to do......