Garden works, part 3: creating the track bed

Having the layout components already arrived, I've decided to spend the weekend working in the garden. And since no real work was done so far, the first steps were to match the track pieces and start working on laying the ballast.

I consider careful planning as important as the work itself, so before doing anything I printed out my plans. Those included several variants, even though I had everything well measured and designed:

Step one: put the track on the garden surface and check that it fits as planned. The most obvious approach for me here was to start from the corner and place the track in a defined distance from the garden's fence. This is what it looked like at that stage:

While working in this area, I've noticed that the soil was very wet in the corner. This seems like a potential source of problems for the future.

I've used the track pins provided by PIKO to make the connection between the track pieces more reliable and continued around the planned layout:

Very soon I've found out that even with all the careful planning I've done, it didn't really fit. There was a gap of around 5cm and I couldn't close the loop.

Whose fault was that? The manufacturer of the track? The retailer? The authors of the SCARM software? Well, none of those, of course!

Turns out my garden isn't really that flat. And a track placed on an uneven surface doesn't behave as imagined. Once I dug a ditch to allow the track to lay really flat, the problem was gone.

And from here I just continued digging until all of the track could be easily placed in the ditch.

As you can see, I'm placing the curve on the far left still on the grass surface. I consider this part temporary. As I'll be getting more track to extend my layout I will be moving this curve farther to the left.

I remember writing about how I did not know how much ballast 200kg of grit was. So now I do know that and it's not really that much. As I started filling the ditch I quickly ran out the rocks and wasn't able to finish my work.

Most of the ditch is filled but it's way below the needed level in many places. So I'll be buying 200kg more this week.

***

I had one interesting idea concerning the electrical connection of the garden layout. After all the track needs to be powered (somehow).

At first I just wanted to run the cabling from the tracks to my flat straight through the garden. But this of course required, first: a lot of digging and then: repairing the lawn.

Fortunately I realized that I can use the elements I'm working on currently to hide the cable. So in addition to the work on the track bed, I'm also working on placing a border that will split the garden into daddy's area and the children's area. I'm using some paving stones for that and of course they need an additional ditch, too. And exactly that ditch is perfect for running the cable.

This really simplifies my work now and will lower the effort needed for any future maintenance.

That's all for this weekend. My next steps are:

• buy more grit and fill the gaps
• let the ballast "settle down"
• continue digging for the future track