Construction
The railway itself is built on wooden shelves, about a foot above the flowerbeds in our tiny courtyard garden. These use exterior decking pine and heavy duty shelf angles. The great advantage of this meathod is that the railway is PERFECTLY level! The disadvantage is that it does not look very railway like! I am working on this with balast and other railway features such as fences and telegraph poles. Below the simple construction can be seen when first installed, to the right you can see the planks have since weatherd into the garden! For the new extension I am looking to build an extra flowerbed on top of the existing flowerbed on top of which to build the extension. This means I can plant a miniature landscape actually at railway level!
Rather fine scale gauge 1 (10mm to the foot scale) track has been used as I had a large quantity left over from my first experienses in the wonderful world of garden railways. This looks rather odd with the 16mm to the foot scale railway and I am slowely getting round to removing 5 in every 15 sleepers and respacing them to give a more 'narrow gauge' feel. This is taking simply ages though!