Garden Railroad 2024

The railroad is alive again in the backyard. It's a project without an end, but we are at a respectable point now. It's looking and working like a small, simple garden railroad.

I solved a few technical problems in this version. I obtained a 0-4-0 switching locomotive. And it is much more forgiving of track irregularities and tight radiuses. I also determined that some of the derailment issues that I had earlier were because the curves I formed resulted in reduced track spacing at the track joints. I created polypropylene stretchers for those areas and got the spacing back to the intended 45 millimeters.

To give the pile of dirt a fresh finish and a blank pallette for development, I hauled in a cubic yard of gray crusher fines. Locally the material is known as "gray chat". The material has lots of fines mixed in with small crushed gravel. It forms an effective weed barrier, but we can dig through it and run irrigation to planting areas as we progress.

The MHDW railroad is back in business.