Thoughts About a Garden Railroad

Even though our summers are extremely short up here in Vermont, I've always had nagging thoughts about a small garden railroad nestled somewhere in amidst our flower gardens.  I think I finally found the right place among our gardens for a small elevated garden railroad.  

Adjacent to where our backyard putting green was located (I'm in the process of repurposing this area to horseshoe pits...  another ongoing project for this spring), we had a small, overgrown garden area consisting of some shrubs, berry vines and mostly weeds.  In the process of cleaning up this area for the horseshoe pits, I saw this area in the very different light that I felt would be great for a small garden railroad.  The area is about 16' x 8'.  

Here is an aerial view of this small area...

The round things lined up in a row running across the top of the image are concrete test cylinders that I have been using as a border along one side of the pitching and putting green.  I've been using these cylinders stuck into the ground, vertically, at differing heights.  I need to re-align some of these cylinders but I actually used the basic contour of this edging as the shape of one side of this small garden railroad.  

I mounted my action camera on one of our roof rakes so I could capture a photo from above.  Once I had this image and the dimensions, I was able to lay out track sections the way I wanted by using software on my computer which can be seen in the photo of this layout plan below...

These garden trains are large scale trains.  The smallest of the train cars is the little bobber caboose seen above.  As you can see in the photo, this small train car is as long as the 11" side of this standard sheet of paper.  Most other train cars are in the range of 18"-24" and the locomotive and tender is about 30" long.  These are big trains on big tracks.

Back to this area of the backyard...  Let's consider the straight tracks at the bottom of the image the "front" of this layout and the dogbone stretch of track along the concrete cylinders to be the "back" of the layout.  The front of this area is a foot higher than the rear along the concrete cylinders.  I plan to have the track elevated, but level, throughout this entire area.  The front side will be elevated a foot which means the rear along the concrete cylinder border will be elevated two feet above the ground.  

The larger radii curve on the left will be elevated by a large curved wood trestle bridge.  Along much of the long straight track will be a small field of Lupines.  I want to have some point of interest on the smaller curve too...  maybe a rock cliff with a curved snow shed?  I know I want something of interest down on this end too but I have plenty of time to decide though.

At the moment, I am still collecting used track for this project.  Each section of track costs about $12-20 each when purchased new.  That is pretty steep so I've been slowly collecting the track I need as I find it available on eBay.  

A long time ago, I decided that I was going to convert my big steam locomotive in this scale to battery power with sound and controlled by a phone/tablet app.  I already designed a system for that.  I also have a trolley and I've designed that for the same battery power and remote wireless control.  I plan to slowly convert this steam locomotive and this trolley over the next few months to a year.  My ultimate goal is to have this running in the backyard by next spring (2025).  

By converting the power to battery power, I don't need to worry at all about keeping the tracks clean.  The locomotive and the trolley will not be picking up power from the tracks.  The power will come from high amperage lithium ion battery packs hidden inside the tender (for the steam locomotive) and inside the trolley along with the necessary electronics for sound and bluetooth wireless control.  Dirty tracks will not affect how well these trains run once I get this part of the project completed.

This also got me thinking about capturing video from the train as it runs around the little garden layout.  I do have a small action camera that I use for various projects and it would be easy to mount on my gondola train car (as seen below).  

Below is the view of this camera train car from the tracks...

And below, we can see what the view will look like from this camera mounted on the gondola.  It would be cool to get a video of the layout from the point of view of being on the train but, also, the grandkids will like this view as the train makes its way around the layout.

This little screen shown in the photo above mounts on a wrist bracelet like a large smart watch.  The screen is pretty small but you can still see things fairly clearly.  When it comes to the younger, smaller grandchildren, this small screen really isn't all that small.  

So this has been another project I have been working on little by little and will be working on little by little until it is finally completed.  I'm looking forward to it!