Garden works, part 5: extending the layout

The next batch of my garden track arrived some time ago but the poor weather discouraged me from doing any work outside. Luckily it got better last Sunday and I was able to start. The first step was again attaching the new track to mark the path where to bed should be.

After that it was digging the ditch and filling it with grit. The same as previously.

The track was not very flat after it was placed on the bed. And that was not surprising at all. It can be even seen in the magnification of the above photo:

I was not terribly worried about this for two reasons:

• I got some feedback from more experienced colleagues at the MyLargeScale forum
• I took the following photo of a real life track that is in daily operation and it's not really straight at all

Bad, isn't it? One could wonder whether that track is safe.

I fixed some of the obvious problems with the track geometry by adding or removing stones. It looked pretty straight after that.

My next step was fixing the track in place but before that I had to perform a test:

"Fixing in place" was going to be achieved by mixing some finer granularity grit with cement and using it to fill the space between the sleepers:

That is too much cement in the mix, you definitely need less

I filled the gaps and distributed the ballast evenly with a brush:


Now all I needed was a willing little helper. Kids usually love playing with water. And my daughter is no exception here. She was very happy to turn the dry cement into a glue that would hold the ballast together.

72 hours later the track is fixed in place. It's actually so solid that I wonder whether making any changes will be as easy as I hoped it would be. And this is what it looks like:

Yes, it's dirty... And I thought I cleaned it well when watering the cement.

Some lessons learnt:

• Use less cement in the mix
• A finer granularity ballast would be so much better and easier to use
• There's some serious track cleaning ahead of me which could have been avoided (at least to some extent) by spraying the water more carefully

My newly extended track is now several meters longer and next weekend I'm going to run my train on it!