(No plan survives first contact with the enemy)

Well we have been at our new house for two years now and not one single piece of track has been put down. This has to do with both the sheer scale of our new garden -and what was left in it.... Having removed the smashed greenhouse and the anderson shelter we are left with an area that is strewn with glass shards and WW2 bomb shrapnel -this is destined to be the lawn!!! Large lumps of concrete turned out to be a building foundation and unearthed sealed bags marked; "Danger Asbestos" -had everyone moving very rapidly. (Fortunately the bags didn't contain anything more dangerous than pieces of plasterboard).

But now, as the snow covers the ground, I feel confident that the bulk of the garden archeology has been done and we know what is in, on, (or under) -the garden... The following drawing is a representational one as a scale one would be just too large to be feasible in a web page -and yes we do have a 1:12 scale drawing to work from made out of sheets of A4 graph paper taped together. The soil in the new garden has proved to amazing. It is deep it is heavy clay and it seems to be devoid of anything else really. The first soil test kit we bought showed nothing present and a Ph of 4!!! Not unnaturally we thought the kit was wrong, and we bought another, (more expensive), one -this said there was "some" Fe, K, P and N with a soil Ph of 4... At this point we knew we had problems. The first year was spent madly sewing clover and meadow sweet everywhere and then hacking it back on nearly a monthly basis. We imported bags of "Organic Fertiliser", "Spent Hops", and "Mushroom Compost"... The net result is that after two years of this we have a soil with a Ph of 6 and with "noticeable" amounts of nutritional elements. The upshot of this has been that for the past two years our garden looked like a designer jungle cum collection of steaming compost heaps...

The garden now has fruit bushes with fruit trees on the north side and I intend to have a go with training the fruit trees in the Victorian manner. Now that the firm planting is in place, and the markers, (bright orange twine), have been stretched between the survey pegs, and the track through the garden -finally reveals itself...

As I have stated elsewhere the curves are all tangential. The reason for the radius of the corners has more to do with my lazy mathematics than the required axle spacing. This is classed in the Greenly books as being a tight curve at slightly less than 8 feet (2.4m). However since I know what the curves are I can -in the words of Mr Billington former CME of the LBSC; "Design my locomotives for my railway". The maths show that for Gauge ‘3’ work, 4-6-4 (or 2-CO-2) with a maximum axle spacing of 15.7cm is the biggest fixed wheelbase that I can use. (The "S" Motor is a special case -as all the drivers are squashed together at nearly flange to flange spacing!)

I have, (I think), built enough track to go from the bottom right hand corner to the half way around the first curve on the top left hand side, (the 70 degree one at 11 feet or 3.2m radius). I have plenty of track supplies to go at while the snow is on the ground and the shed is cold!

At full speed I can make 1 yard of track in 2 hours or if you prefer...

25 sleepers, 50 chairs, 100 nails, and 2 lengths of rail!!!