I have always been a model railway nut since my father bought me a Hornby railway when I was 2. My father built the railway into the loft at our family home and me and my brother spent many happy hours up there. When I bought my first house, I built a OO/HO railway in the garden and ran great long trains, once I had cleaned the track and removed any leaves on the track. So Mrs Mouse, when she first met me, realised that model railways were in her future, if she carried on with me. So when we got married and moved to a larger house, where we could have a family, I suggested that while the OO/HO had been fun, what we really needed for the new house was a G gauge model railway.
So OO/HO has a gauge of 16mm and is quite small for a garden setting, whereas G gauge is 45mm and far more suited to the outdoors. However, being larger, the cost is larger too. Obviously budgets would need to be discussed, so I took Mrs Mouse to a garden railway shop to pitch the idea. At the time, the big European producer of G gauge was LGB (Lehmann Gartenbahn) and they also made track for the Playmobil train. The day out was a lot of fun and Mrs Mouse fell in love with a large blue LGB model of an American diesel from the White Pass & Yukon Railroad which runs from the port of Skagway, Alaska, to Whitehorse. We bought the blue diesel, some track, a Playmobil railway set, some second hand bits and a controller power supply. The budget was blown, but we had a shared thing for our garden and our first bit of Playmobil for when we had kids. At the time we were both working to pay down the large mortgage we had on the new house, so this was a bit of fun for us.
The garden was set out with a place for the railway, but then we had kids, built a conservatory with holes for the railway to go through but still no track laid. The railway was set up in the house and played with many times, but life got in the way of building the garden railway until 2022, when the deck was finally built out of sleepers, which would be thick enough to allow track to be inlayed into the surface as a tramway track is in the road. 2023 came along and the question was how do you inlay track into a very nice deck, without wrecking it. The solution was a fast 3D printer which could print ASA filament which is UV stable. I designed tram track pieces, that I printed, which would take G gauge rail sections which you can buy with no sleepers. This was then carefully cut into the top of the deck with a router.
The second picture also shows the hole into the conservatory. I built the conservatory many years ago and left a hole in the brickwork for the railway. I had many ideas on how to fill the hole and provide doors for the railway. The 3D printer solved all of those problems and all what you see in the brickwork and the bridge is 3D printed.
The 3D printer can use 8 colours in one print, so in some items, I make use of this feature. Careful design is required to get colour with not too much waste filament. I love 3D printing in the way I can get stuff in my head in to a 3D object. Having done a small bridge, I realised that by bolting girders together I could make a longer bridge than the bed of my printer. I then set out on a long trestle girder bridge, each section being 250mm long, ending up with a 3m bridge.
The railway has fitted into the garden and deck as we planned it many years ago. Shame that it took so long to get trains running in the garden, but life gets in the way. This picture shows the railway in the rain so the wood is darker. The light grey ASA was chosen to blend into the dry weathered wood colour.
The latest part of the story is me turning 60. To mark this I was allowed to buy a steam engine which I have wanted for more than 20 years, after seeing it on the Roundhouse stand at the Warley model railway show. Mrs Mouse and I took a trip to Doncaster to the Roundhouse factory where we both drove a steam engine. To a train nerd who loves LNER engines from Flying Scotsman to Mallard and P2s. Going to Doncaster to order a steam engine seemed totally correct. A model of a 2-6-2 Baldwin tender locomotive run by the Sandy River and Rangely Lakes Railroad in Maine was ordered in blue... A few months later, we took another trip to Doncaster to pick up our loco.
And home on our track to steam up.
Is the railway complete? NO!! The track through the station area is temporary and only one of the two ports into the conservatory is done. However, we can run trains on a continuous loop of the garden. The tunnel that I built 20 years ago, is now host to trains passing through it
So you may have questions of scale? Yes, there is a mixture but I don't care. Early on I loved my Flying Scotsman model in OO (4mm to the foot) and happily bought European and American models in HO (3.5mm to the foot) Both OO and HO run on 16mm track, which is out of scale for OO. In G gauge many prototypes whether narrow gauge or standard gauge, all run on 45mm track. S,R & R,L is 2 foot gauge, White Pass is 3 foot gauge, Chessie System is standard gauge (4' 8 1/2")
I love many trains from all parts of the world but my passion is LNER and Union Pacific, which all stems from seeing a model of Big Boy in a model shop when I was a kid. When we were in the States, we went to the National Railway Museum in Green Bay, where in one room you can see the A4 pacific Dwight D. Eisenhower and next to it No 4017 Union Pacific Big Boy. A few years ago I had a loverly day out in York with my daughter, where all six surviving A4 Pacifics, (including Dwight D. Eisenhower which was shipped over for the event) were together for “The Great Gathering” of 2013, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the record-breaking run of Mallard.
Sorry for the long post, but someone asked about the railway.... If any of you are ever in the UK Cambridge area, do look us up. Our house is never tidy since we have many hobbies and run a business from the house. However we now have a working railway!
