Garden layout plan

I started thinking about the G scale layout back in winter when the weather wouldn't allow me to do anything really. So I had quite some time to think and plan.

My garden is rectangular (and flat) around 13 meters by 11 meters. One side of the garden is adjacent to the house and there are two exits there, so using that side for laying the track might meet some resistance from my family :) And of course I want to keep some grass area, so that my kids can still play in the garden. All in all I ended up with a desire to build a U-shaped layout (marked in orange):

That idea however has (at least) two weak points:

• the garden has another exit that is heavily used by my kids (who visit the neighbour kids that way) and I'm not really sure (yet) how that affects laying the track there 
• it requires a lot of track (which I simply cannot afford in one shot)

I'll start with something simpler then. I'll just use the left side of the garden for now. This will be cheaper and I don't have to tackle the "exit problem" right away.

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Planning the track layout is easy when you have the right tools. Being a Linux user my choices are limited. Fortunately SCARM works really nice on Linux and it allowed me to do everything I needed.

The plan for the first year is to make just a nice loop on the garden's left side:

I can make it as long as the budget will allow me and by adding an additional twist, I'll make it more interesting. I'll use PIKO's G scale track - seems to be as good as LGB and slightly cheaper.

And in the next years (and if the idea works out at all) I can easily extend it to the other side of the garden. Maybe there's even a potential for two independent tracks there - one on the left and one on the right side of the garden:

But for now it's going to be just one train and one loop...