Trestle Bridge Deck

We've had nothing but rain for the past ten days or so which means nothing was accomplished outside.  And, before these past ten days, I had one half of a day to get the lawn done.  We had about two or three weeks of solid rainy weather before that one clear day.  Since it has been raining for the past ten days, this also means that the lawn was very overgrown and needed attention before I did anything else so I spent two or three hours working on the lawn.

After getting the lawn done, I pulled out the table saw so I could do some work on our garden railroad.  This was the first bit of work that I've done on the railroad this year.  I have a few things I'd like to accomplish in detailing this little garden railroad which I hope to get done little by little throughout the summer.

Today's project was to cut a bunch of long ties to make a deck for the long compound curved wood trestle bridge.  I needed about 90 long ties.  Fortunately, I had enough scrap lumber in the shed to rip and cut to shape.  

After installing the ties in place, I pulled out the air compressor and nail gun so I could spike these new ties in place...

Wood trestles, traditionally, have had barrels of water at short intervals along the length of the wood trestle.  This was in case sparks from the train started a fire.  The water barrels were used to extinguish the fire.  I still need to add small platforms at about every fourth bent so I can place a barrel on each platform.  I needed to install these long ties first...

I thought that ripping and cutting these ties would be very time consuming but the ripping and cutting went very quickly.  It took far more time to actually install and spike down the ties in place.

We have some flowers in this garden now.  I planted these red flowers, photo below, a couple of weeks ago.  They are called "Bejeweled Rose Rhinestones".  We also have some lupines that I planted last year coming up.  The garden part of this railroad should look significantly better this season!  Last year it never recovered from me trampling it while building the railroad.

I was happy to see that the long winter season didn't cause any noticeable damage to this railroad.  Actually, I was pleasantly surprised we didn't get any damage other than some minor weathering!  

I wrote above that today was a very rare sunny day after ten days of rain...  before I was able to put all my tools away this evening, it started raining again!  Tomorrow is supposed to be a really nice day for a change...  finally!