Poolside Rails

A model railroad in a basement is an amazing thing. You work hard and build the benchwork. You don’t see the framework that looks more like the inside of a boat because, in your mind’s eye, you can see the mountains and the sidings and exactly where the engine house will go. You build the supports for the track and the hills and roads, and you lay down the hydrocal. Even though it looks like a snowstorm, now in your head you can see the green grass, the steep waterfall, and that trestle about which you’ve been dreaming. Finally that day comes when, joy of joys, you’ve planted the last tree and glued down the last gandy dancer. It’s done! Now every visitor sees your vision played out, and oohs and ahhs appropriately. All they are doing, of course, is providing the real time soundtrack to the oohs and ahhs you’ve heard in your head since you started the benchwork!

But your garden railroad, well that’s different. Your project is outside, in plain view of everybody and everything. What in your head looks like a model railway taking shape looks to everyone else like the construction project that it really is.

Garden railroading is for real. Sure the trains are miniature, and the goods and passengers aren’t real. But the trains pass through real landscapes, are impacted by real weather, and the water in your ponds will breed mosquitoes if you’re not careful. It is that element of reality that makes all the difference. In exchange for the control you have in the basement, which, of course, you must absolutely forgo, you have the very real challenges that have faced empire builders for a hundred and fifty years. That’s pretty cool.

Over the weekend I was down in the dirt, scraping and shaping the watercourse into which I eventually poured concrete. It was hard, dusty work, and it took a lot of thinking and worrying to get it right. Although the concrete doesn’t show it now, there’s a fair amount of shirtsleeve engineering going on out there in my China section. I had to lay a roadbed, clear a tunnel, flatten out a space for a railroad station, and build a tiny storm drain on Saturday. Sunday was concrete pouring day, and it was all rather stressful. Pleasant, but stressful.

Sunday afternoon I paused to admire my concrete with my seven year old daughter. She will swear to you that she helped with the concrete, while I will swear that I swore at the concrete. Anyway, there we stood.

“Daddy,” she said, turning towards me, “it looks like the mountains”

Well, there it is. The difference between hydrocal draped over benchwork and real railroading. Yes, the mountain is just a pile of dirt and rocks (and which mountains aren’t?), but the scale and the fact that it’s outside under the trees has a very realistic effect, even here in the dirt moving phase of construction. It’s realistic because it’s real! Needless to say, my daughter got a raise in her allowance.

The point of this diatribe is to point out that garden railroading forces a huge shift in perspective. My daughter points out, perhaps more accurately, that garden railroading is ultimately more realistic because, ultimately, it takes place in the real world!

And yes, those are Littlest Pet Shop toys in the middle picture. My wife and I are agreed that this will be a great play area for our little girl. What? A model railway with PLAY VALUE? Unheard of!

Having a track plan is part of a marvelous thing. The plan will tell you what goes where, and how, at least on paper, things will work. You know what to build, and how to position it, and wire it, and get it to be exactly what’s needed right there.

But a track plan, in and of itself, is rather limited. It’s flat, and, even in my 3D SketchUp drawings, is uni-dimensional. What’s lacking is action (duh, it’s a plan,hello?). Not the action of trains moving around and crossing gates rising, but construction action. Looking at my plan, I see that there is no sequence of construction. I know I have this to do and that to do, but there is no order, no sequence, nothing that links my track plan to the chaotic mess that’s out there in the yard right now.

A plan without action is wasted time. Energy without direction is wasted energy. So energy applied to a plan without action is a waste of what, time and energy? Well, enough of that, then!

Track Plan Part II: Action Plan

Here’s where we start pulling ahead of the pack, separating our railway from the gazillion point ten track plans still on the shelf. We develop an action plan that complements our track plan.

Points of Action:
1. Pour concrete in China
2. Clear and restore/repair tracks in China
3. Build the road bridge in China
4. Replace Chinese railroad bridge
5. Design and plan Chinese building locations
6. Build and place Chinese structures
7. Landscape China
8. Replace Kazakhstani bridge
9. Restore rails from Kazakhstani through Paris
10. Design and build Kazakhstan
11. Design and build Ukraine
12. Design and build Paris

Now, a track plan without an action plan is wasted time. An action plan without a timeline is a busted dream (pretty good imagery, huh?). So, gulp, here goes:

1. Done
2. By July 15, ‘09
3. By Aug 15, ‘09
4. By Sep 15, ’09
5. By Oct 01, ‘09
6. That’s going to take some time. Since we’ve got the locations in place, it could take us six months before we have buildings we like. Hmmm…I’ll say Apr 15, ‘10
7. By Nov 01, ‘09
8. That’s another tall order. I imagine we’ll get to designing both bridges in the very near future. But that’s a long bridge, and we’ll be into the holidays. I’ll say Feb 15, ‘10
9. By Jan 01, ‘10
10. Things are starting to bunch up, aren’t they? We’ve got the Chinese buildings in the works, the long Kazakhstani bridge in building, and now we’re adding to new scenery. I’ll say designed by Feb 01, ’10, but not completed until Jun 15, ’10.
11. The Ukraine will be more complex than Kazakhstan on account of I’m planning a railway stop there. I’ll stay with designed by Feb 01, ’10, but construction not done until Jun 15.
12. That leaves us the summer an d fall to build Paris. I’m really looking forward to the Parisian part of our trip…it will be the showcase. But Paris will be far more complex to build than China, and I’m afraid that if I start with Paris, I may become bogged down and never get to China. China, on the other hand, is relatively simple and will offer many rewards that will encourage me to continue to Paris. Ah hah!

So, there it is. We’ve accomplished quite a bit, haven’t we? We moved our track plan off the shelf by associating an action plan with it. And we’ve breathed existence into the action plan by pinning it to a timeline.

I am making light of it, of course, but the action plan/timeline combination is critically important to far more than just a dopey backyard railway. Plans without deadlines are just dreams that won’t come true, like making wishes in a mayonnaise jar.
Trying to accomplish anything meaningful is made doubly more difficult by attempting it without a plan. But having a plan is not enough – it needs to have an element of time, a start and stop component, to make it more meaningful than a wish in a mayonnaise jar.

And then, you have to do it…

Pouring concrete is at once intimidating and rewarding. Intimidating because concrete is the stuff of major buildings all over the world, and what in heaven’s name do I know about concrete? Rewarding because, once you’ve got it done, you realize, hey, look at me! I can pour concrete! Maybe I’ll try a skyscraper!

Of course, in today’s exercise, I didn’t pour concrete as one pours milk, but rather blopped concrete by hand in specific locations. But it was just as rewarding, once I got past the idea that I was seriously screwing it up!

First things first: mixing your concrete. I filled a plastic bucket around ¼ full of water and then added Quikcrete Concrete mix with a garden shovel. I poured the concrete in with my left hand while agitating the mixture with my right. I wanted a thick, putty-like finish. Boy, was I surprised! Plaster of Paris sets up very quickly, even in the mixing bowl if you dawdle. Not so Mr. Concrete. I kept adding more and more powder, expecting it to thicken like plaster does. What you get in the concrete bucket is an ever deepening layer of sand and pebbles at the bottom of the water. There is no thickening, or any sign that you’ve done anything beyond get the powder wet.

The secret of mixing, then, is to make absolutely sure you completely integrate the sand and water together, so that there are no clumps. Clumps, when poured into your final location, will result in dry, non-adhesive pockets of powder.

Now, this area to which I applied concrete was 1910 eastern rural China, not big on paved streets and parking lots. So, instead of squaring off my landscaping with wooden borders and pouring the concrete in, I chose to place it by the handful. The advantages are that you get a thinner finished coat which dries faster, and you can control pretty carefully where the concrete goes. I tried to get it to flow between my rocks at the top of the ridge and down around the drain pipe in the lower level area above the tunnel.

The second secret of concrete is to buy more mix than you think you’ll need. I bought mine at Lowe’s for about three bucks. For two bucks, I could have gotten a ten pound bag, and I was sorely tempted. I figured it would be much easier to handle a ten pound bag than the three dollar sixty pounder. But I heard my wife’s voice asking “what are you, crazy?” when I realized I could get six times more mix for only fifty percent more money. Today I used at least thirty-five pounds of the mix! I laid a patch roughly eight inches wide by six feet long by about an inch deep, and it took two thirds of the bag. Had I gone with the flyweight bag, I would have been back at Lowe’s, covered in concrete powder, looking like a dope. Thank you, my wife!

In applying the concrete, there is a wet method and a dry method of application. The wet method is where you pour the concrete onto the ground directly from the bucket. All of the water goes with it, creating something of a soup with sand and gravel at the bottom. I chose the dry, using my hand to scoop goop out of the bucket and allowing the bulk of the water to drain back into the bucket before applying the concrete. The advantage is that you can place the wet mixture without much runoff. I chose this method because most of my landscape here is sloping, and I didn’t want the mixture to run. I planted a few “grabbers”, high profile rocks stuck into the ground around which the concrete can adhere, but not enough to hold a poured batch in place.

That’s the third secret of concrete: you want to plant stakes or pointy rocks or other objects, even holes in the ground, to provide a dimensional hold for your concrete. If you just pour it, the concrete simply sits on top of the ground with nothing to anchor it. These “grabbers” will keep your concrete stuck where you placed it.

I checked it about twenty minutes ago…it’s been sitting out there now for about ten hours. It still has that moist dark gray sheen, but it’s beginning to firm up!

Remember yesterday how I told you the story of the TV director that didn’t want to close his shoot in case he forgot something? Same thing happened to me today. I just didn’t want to clean up the concrete for fear I’d forgotten something. So I looked and looked and looked again to make sure I hadn’t concreted something I shouldn’t and hadn’t left anything uncovered. But, in the end, I hit it all.

Tomorrow’s light will reveal the value of the job I did. Goodness, we’re almost down to working on the rails!

Well, the best laid plans are those of mice and men, or something like that. The one thing I wanted to do today was pour that concrete…but the day got in the way. The true story? I’m afraid to pour the concrete…all right, there, I said it. It’s true.

I was an actor in a television commercial once. We started at nine in the morning and worked straight through until two o’clock the next morning. The last shot of the day had the lead actress get up from her chair, sighing as she went. The director wasn’t happy with it. He kept shooting it again and again…I swear we went through 37 takes of that shot. And the director kept reading the actress the riot act, telling her she was doing it wrong; “breathe IN when you sigh, not OUT,” and then “Why are you breathing IN when you sigh? Nobody does that!”. When we were done I asked the actress why she put up with all that harassment. She said she knew the director was simply scared…he didn’t want to close down the set for fear he’d missed something during the day’s shooting, but couldn’t identify the missing item, and therefore kept running the same shot over and over out of fear. That’s not why I’m afraid of pouring the concrete, but it’s a cool story.

Pouring concrete is a permanent step, and I’m not quite ready at the job site. Just a couple of more things have to be cleared up before I’m ready, but I will most likely be able to hit it tomorrow.

Instead, how about the wooden cab on that locomotive? I’m sorry about the photographs…I had no idea they were so out of focus until I posted them. I’ll do better ones as the project moves forward.

The chassis is the previously mentioned Bachmann 4-6-0 that I’ve converted into a 4-4-0. I did it by removing the two front drivers. As you can see from the track plan, I’ve got some mighty tight turns that were just too much for that long wheelbase.

This locomotive is battery driven, and Bachmann put the batteries in the boiler. Well, I can’t reduce the size of the battery box, but there’ s plenty of room at the front end of the boiler. There’s a circuit card up there that manages the remote control. Goodbye. I removed about two inches from the boiler forward of the battery box, editing out the forward dome. Of course, AFTER I’d cut the beast apart I realized that there was a gentle taper from the steam dome to the forward rib. Well, there’s not one of those on MY engine!

That cab is the correct height for a 1/18 fellow to stand upright in the center. What’s interesting about it is the rib structure for the roof. Eventually it will be planked completely, but I wanted to show you the planking process. Do you see the individual strips in that third shot? Recognize them?

Coffee stir-sticks. Yes, stir-sticks. These are six inches long by a quarter inch wide…perfect planks. And boy, are they cheap! You can get a box with a thousand of them in there for four bucks from Smart and Final! The sides of the cab will feature wider planking, and that will be made from popsicle sticks! The ribs for the roof are from wider popsicle sticks, Micheal’s sells them as Craft Sticks, and you can get a big box for about five bucks.

Popsicle and stir-sticks seem to be the ultimate in cheap, extremely useful building materials. They make terrific planks. Glue four stir-sticks edge to edge in a square and you have a beam. Glue two craft sticks to stir-sticks forming a box and you have a 4×12 beam! The popsicle sticks make great clapboarding on buildings, too!

Although the sticks perform well with Alene’s Tacky Glue, we’re working outside. Epoxy, my friend. I’m using Five Minute Epoxy from ITW Performance Polymers. Five minutes is a pretty good fiddle time, and it cures in an hour to a super hard bond. It’s sandable, and holds paint well.

There are only two caveats to using cheapo wooden popsicle and coffee stir sticks; sand them before you paint them (they’re often coated with a light wax to keep them from absorbing your popsicle juice and coffee), and make sure you drill pilot holes before using nails or spikes – they are the very most bargain-basement quality of wood, and you can often split them just by looking at them too hard!

There you go! Three things in one posting; an honest admission of failure, a cool Hollywood story, and a super cheap, easy to use building material. What more could you want? I know, I know, concrete!

Okay, I promise, these are the last CAD drawings I’ll post, unless requested or unless I create another I think is worthy of posting. These may not be worthy of posting, except that they show you how to create buildings and trees.

I was reticent to include buildings and trees in this track plan because they’re difficult to draw in SketchUP…well, the trees are, but the buildings are a snap!

But now that the Paris buildings are in place on the drawing, my life has become much easier. Now I know how many buildings to build, and where they will sit, and what size they will be. The detailed picture of the buildings shows a large, rhomboidal structure in the foreground, bordering the tracks. This will be the Gare St. Lazare. I had originally placed it at the apex of the curve off to the right, because the original builder of the layout had his station there. But who places their station on a curve? Seems to me like a recipe for disaster and a magnet for derailments.

So, Paris is done, sort of. Obviously I didn’t go into detail on the buildings because we’re not to the constructions stage yet.

Walt Disney’s engineering guys came up with a really clever method of modeling full scale buildings. If you walk down Main Street or New Orleans Square in either Disneyland or Disney World, you’ll see multiple story buildings surrounding you. To maintain an air of openness, however, they didn’t want full size buildings crowding the skyline. Instead they created buildings with full size first floors, but with second floors 25% smaller in scale. The result is a building that looks normal from the street but is in fact rather short. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the windows are really rather small. The scaling is magnificent, right down to the clapboard siding…there is nothing to tell your eye it’s being tricked!

In model railroading I know it’s a common practice to reduce the depth of structures in order to save space. But what about reducing height by scale compression? The advantages in model railroading might not be as pronounced as they are in a theme park, although you could build monstrously tall-looking buildings that weren’t, and thereby save materials. In backyard railroading, too, you don’t necessarily want your buildings topping the fence line. Actually, now that we think about it, what is the number one icon of Paris? I’m certainly not going to model the Eiffel Tower in 1/18th scale! But a smaller scale relief model backed up to the fence would benefit from height compression…Hmmm.

I wonder if scale expansion would be feasible? What if the second floor was 25% taller than the first, and the third 25% taller than that? I imagine you’d have a powerfully big city filled with three story buildings!

Those trees: I wanted to locate the trees geographically so that I could build around them. Clearly, God’s terrific creations can’t be replicated by my clumsy 3D modeling hands. But, now we can at least see where the trees are. The process is simple: draw a circle and then “pull” it up to represent the trunk all the way up to full height. Then draw a wider circle at the top and “pull” it down to represent the carefully pruned branches: look! A topiary Popsicle!

That middle picture: I called the picture Scene_Changer.Gif to make it easier to figure out what it is. You know that a good railroad is like good theater: the train is the actor, moving from scene to scene throughout the production. Well, my train needs to move from the Ukraine to Kazakhstan, but visually there’s nothing to separate the two. So, the Scene Changer will be a tunnel or railway bridge or something that helps the eye distinguish one scene from the next.

So, these are the last of the CAD drawings. I’m dying to pour my concrete. Tomorrow is Saturday…what better day for pouring concrete than a Saturday?

When I adopted this railway, a result of buying a house with a pre-built railway in the backyard, it had no formal existence. The guy who built it wanted to watch the trains go ‘round and ‘round and his wife wanted to have an exotic garden. A match made in heaven!

You know that every railway has a story…if not a prototype, at least an operational story to give it existence. The story adds credence to the railway, and helps you, the modeler, focus your modeling efforts. It gives the viewer a sense of place and time. At least, that’s what a model railway is supposed to do. I can’t imagine the boredom of watching trains go ‘round and ‘round a track without purpose or meaning. Seems to me rather a waste of time.

Anyway, I am the quasi-proud owner of this modified dogbone ‘round and ‘round track that I’ve left to nature for some years, and now I’m resurrecting it.

Our railway operates in the year 1910. Automobiles are making an emergence on the streets of Paris, which is where our journey begins. We leave the Gare St. Lazare and creep through the paved streets of an iron-embellished downtown Paris aboard our custom-built narrow gauge locomotive. Although I’m fairly certain there wasn’t a narrow gauge track that ran out of Gare St. Lazare, we’re making an impossible journey anyway, so what the heck. Our journey takes us from Paris across the Ukraine, where we see some onion domes behind the local Ukrainian train station. We pass through the steppes of central Kazakhstan without seeing a soul. Across central China we see a hillside village, even a palace, way up there in the peaks, before we arrive at our destination; Shanghai. We just reach the outskirts of the sleepy town before looping back home.

As you’ll see from the track plans I’ve posted this week, my layout features four distinct segments, or panels, as part of its original design. It runs along a wall to the west of my swimming pool, across the face of stone columns that support the fence. Each of these columns makes a natural break, and in each of those breaks is where we shall separate the different nations. At the southern end the track makes a turn to the east. That turning point will be central China, and Shanghai will be at the extreme eastern end.

I’m quite concerned about modeling downtown Paris in 1910…that’s a lot of scratchbuilding. And you know that we’re placing this all outdoors, which means we need to scratchbuild in a weatherproof manner, with water runoff being an issue. Ma foi!

That means we must return to SketchUp once more to design the Paris plan to give us a feel for what needs to be done. Although it’s fun, SketchUp is rather time consuming…but you’ll be able to see what a 3D rendered city plan looks like!

I had started remodeling a Bachmann 4-6-0 from its native 1/28th to my needed 1/18th, which, I may tell you, is quite an adventure. The remodel will take it to a 4-4-0 able to navigate my four foot radius curves without hassle.

But, I began the remodel from a western prototype, not the European prototype required for this new rail venture. Back to the books!

Okay, this is it. I’ve goofed around in SketchUp to the point of making mountains…yes, it can be done. Do you want to burn your time on it? Well, maybe, if you want to make an exact, and I do mean exact, 3D plan of your railroad.

How do you model mountains in SketchUp? The secret is in the sticks. Look at the middle illustration, above. You draw the outline of your mountain flat on the ground. Starting “on face”, which is SketchUp’s term for ground zero, you raise those sticks along the “blue” axis. You raise a stick for each altitude contour feature you want to model. When you connect the sticks, SketchUp senses a flat plane and fills it in. You can fill the plane in yourself either with color or with SketchUp’s supplied bitmaps. I believe you can supply your own, too.

So, if you wanted to model your model mountain to the exact inch, you could do it by adjusting the length of the stick you raised off the face of the drawing. Why would you? Well, that’s another question, isn’t it? I did it just to test out the concept, and it works rather well. My mountains are already in existence, so modeling them in this manner is not only very difficult, but a complete waste of time.

SketchUp is a 3D modeling program, however. Once you’ve build your mountains, you can use the program’s Camera feature to walk down your main line, looking from side to side as you go. That’s pretty cool, considering you haven’t driven a single spike!

I’m done with SketchUp and track planning for the moment. I think you can see the shape of the railway, especially now that the mountains are down there on the south end. There will be a road that passes under the extreme eastern end of the railway and climbs up the steep hill, crossing over the railway on its way to the south side of the mountain. Given the complexity of drawing it correctly in SketchUp, I might just skip it and airbrush it in using MS Paint.

Can you use SketchUp, available free from Google, to draw your track plan? Absolutely! Given the simplicity of the tools, can you get the hang of it in an afternoon? Absolutely! Will you have a terrific plan at the end? Absolutely! Do you need that level of detail? Abso…well, that’s up to you, isn’t it?

I took some digital pictures of the Mission Cart when I was out at La Purisima Mission, near Lompoc, CA. I was fascinated by the construction…no power tools here! I dragged the pictures home and roughed out the plan above. When you click on it, it should open up into a full size drawing. What’s missing? That’s right, dimensions. As I recall, the top of the wheel was a little over waist high…make it 42 inches in diameter. The cart was just about that wide as well…let’s round ‘em up to four feet each. The tongue was probably eight feet total. I would imagine a donkey would have pulled this thing.

My railway is going to begin in France and end up in China…maybe I can modify it to look like a Chinese ox cart!

Planning your track can be as complex or as simple as you like. If you’re like me, you’ll probably draw it up on the back of an envelope and call it a day. But, for the purposes of teaching, I decided to get down to drawing in some detail. The more detail you do in the planning stages, the less trouble you’ll run into during construction.

Around my house, we joke about the adage “measure twice, cut once.” I’m always doing it backwards, because I tend to rush my projects more than I ought. Measure once, cut twice, cut again, throw the piece of wood away and start over. If it doesn’t come out the right length, who cares, nail it on anyway. That’s my motto. Square corners? What for?

I bring it up because you need to be careful in your track planning. Tiny mistakes in measurements can have drastic and very nasty results. Sometimes you can get away with “about a quarter inch”. Sometimes things will match up okay. But track needs to handled carefully, unless you’re good with a hacksaw. The worst thing I’ve done so far was to quasi-carefully measure the amount of track I needed, laid track all the way around the layout, until, at the very last, at my Promontory Point, I was a half inch short! The problem was a by-gosh-by-golly measurement somewhere, probably in a curve, that I just plain got wrong.

So, here we are in the digital age, and we can use computers to do our drafting for us. My father was a draftsman, and was a genius at using drafting machines and triangles and French curves to design whatever he wanted. His art disappeared with the advent of the PC and CAD software, but it was a joy to watch him work. Yesterday I reviewed three pieces of software, each available for free, that could do the job of drawing up your track plan. Two of them, CATrain and Googul Choo Choo 3D, didn’t have the degree of finesse required to make an accurate plan.

The third one, Google’s SketchUp, is extremely powerful. So powerful, in fact, as to be a little daunting in its presentation. The software is designed to create objects in three dimensions. If you’re building a shed for your garden, for example, the software lets you design and walk through the shed before you’ve put hammer to nail. There are several tools that work quite simply, but that, I’m certain, mean something important to architects, and will save them tons of time in their design work.

But track plans are traditionally two dimensional. That’s okay, because SketchUp let’s you change the angle of your view. You can set your angle so that you are looking straight down from above. What you draw, then, will be two dimensional, as if drawing your design on the ground.

Messing with it today, however, I discovered another way of thinking about that 2D track plan of yours. Sure, it’s 2D because it’s a plan. But what if you could raise the track to go up hills? What if you could actually raise the landscape around the tunnels? I tried it, with some success. The pictures at the top show the 3D rendering of my garden railway. It sits atop a two foot wall surrounding the south and west sides of my swimming pool. As you can see, the plan comes out pretty cool.

What hasn’t worked out well in SketchUp is landscaping. I have a mountain in my south division that is important, but I haven’t yet figured out how to give it dimension. SketchUp likes to fill in rectangles with a flat pane…you draw four lines it recognizes as forming a flat space and it applies a “filled” sheet over the space. It works great on panels, but fails to recognize what I consider solids in landscaping. For example, those angled panels at the south side of the layout are supposed to be rocks. Hmph.

You can do some amazingly sophisticated work with SketchUp, however. This drawing represents about two hours of work. There’s a story about Albert Einstein and an assistant trying to get into a locked file cabinet. They can’t find the keys, but figure they can pick the lock with a paper clip. These two rifle the office, looking for a paper clip. Along the way, Einstein finds the keys, but tosses them aside: he’s searching for a paper clip! That’s the danger with this kind of software: I’m trying to appease the software by making my track plan fit its parameters…after a while, you begin to wonder who’s really in control!

Again, planning your layout can be as simple or as complex as you like. Taking the time to make accurate measurements of your space, and carefully thinking your track plan through will reward you with an easy construction project. Or, you can do it my way…tearing up your track is almost as fun as trying to cut a section of flex track only half an inch long!

Yesterday I spouted off about the importance of planning your railroad. I did it without having a plan to share with you. I have the plan in my head, but not on paper.

So, I went to my favorite download site, www.downloads.com, and typed in “railroad track plan”, without the quotations. While a few railroad track planners popped up, most of the software offered helped you manage your plans and schedules for vacations and things. Oops.

The first freeware program I downloaded is called CATrain v 1.82. It’s a rough little program, but getting command of it takes about five minutes. I was able to draft out my railway crudely, but close enough to get an impression of how it works. As there is no scale adjustment, and no zoom, what you see is what you get. You can adjust polarities on the rails and then run trains, which is helpful for global planning. Interestingly enough, while there is no capability for creating scenery, there is a tool for building up your train consist. Weird, huh? Although it’s difficult to create a smooth or accurate curve, the grids are quite useful.

The second program I brought down is called GoogolChooChoo. It’s a 3D modeling program that lets you choose between Window’s Open GL or Windows Direct3D to render the image. It’s shareware. It’s a little more smooth than CATrain, but is a far cry from an accurate representation of what your track will look like.

It differs from CATrain in that it allows you some degree of terrain building, but only a small degree. In fact, when you use its built in generator to create terrain, it automatically assumes you mean mountains, and the train layout you created goes UNDER the terrain through a tunnel it generates. It’s a bit of a surprise on your first go-round, I can tell you.

Still, it’s a nice little program, certainly wonderful for the price. It’s a bit glitchy, shutting down on me three times in a row. But, beyond that, and beyond the limitations of scale, it does feature the nice chance to ride around on a train in an environment you created…for free!

Also for free, and most effective, was Google’s SketchUp program. If you’ve played with it, you know that it, too, is a 3D modeling program. I used it to design the sheds I’ll built in my yard, and to design a nifty dollhouse for my daughter.

It has a very comprehensive set of tools that will help you gauge distance and curvature exactly. The plan I drafted in SketchUp appears above. The program is a hog for space and memory, but runs very well and, despite an annoying tendency to join corners together when you don’t want it to, is a pleasure to run. It, too, is for FREE, which speaks well for it.

To create the plan at the top of the post, I created a plan in SketchUp to make sure I got the dimensions correct. Then I exported it as a JPEG file to my hard drive. I opened the JPEG in Paint and added the titles. It’s a little distorted, especially that turn in the northern division, because I cut and paste the image in Paint and wasn’t careful.

Paint will take you a long way in scenery design, I’m thinking. Any other drawing program will as well, I’m assuming.

So now I have a track plan as it exists today. But I am in the process of radically revising the railway, and so I need to revise the plan. I’ll share it with you as soon as it’s done.

I had promised to pour concrete today, but time got away from me. As soon as I do it, you’ll see the process and the results. Thanks for reading!

The single most important thing you can do for your garden railroad is to plan, plan, plan. You know the adage about business: unsuccessful businesses don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan. You can certainly apply that to model railroading, too.

An unplanned railroad, if it doesn’t lead into severe track alignment problems, scenery glitches and electrical snafus, will almost certainly never get completed because the problems to be solved become overwhelming. Either that, or it will end up with an oval of track on which the train goes ‘round and ‘round and the layout dies from boredom. Believe me, I’ve done both!

I’m an artistic soul, and learned the value of delayed gratification only recently. When I put together my first two layouts, I just plain shot from the hip. The first was very similar to the dogbone style railway I have in my backyard now, except that with HO you have enough room to run a double mainline, thereby eliminating the turnouts. Once I got the train running, it just went ‘round and ‘round. I really enjoy scenery, and that’s where I spent my time. But after a while, I wanted to add turnouts, and there was no way to do it without tearing up scenery and track.

In a good plan, you can let your imagination run wild without laying a single piece of flex track. You can add industries and cities and all sorts of things that you could never do shooting from the hip. You can kill features without even wincing. And you can avoid operational pitfalls and ennui by planning your turnouts carefully.

So, do yourself a favor and draft a plan, or go get a good one. Kalmbach Publishing, the company that puts out Model Railroader and Garden Railways magazines, has a huge selection of plans, online and in book form, to get you started. You can find ‘em at www.GardenRailways.com.

That being said, I’m working without a plan!

My situation is a little different. When I say I don’t have a plan, I just don’t have one on paper…yet. Since the railroad is already existing, my plan is kind of limited in scope.

My garden railway is what’s called a “dogbone” style. The track, which sits on top of a nice concrete and brick wall at three feet off the ground, runs north through a turnout, around a four foot diameter circle, back through the turnout, then south down a long straightaway, through another turnout, around another four foot diameter circle, and back through the second turnout to head north again. It’s a very simple plan. There’s a slight rise after the second turnout as you head south. It goes up a slight incline that’s supposed to climb over a water feature. This is the place, however, where the ficus tree’s roots have lifted the roadbed and broken open the rail connections.

This section of the layout is quite a piece of work. There’s a four foot high mountain with a fountain at the top. The water is supposed to trickle down the mountain, through a culvert under the track, and then down some rocks and into our swimming pool. I can’t imagine this system has ever worked well. Along the waterway the builder planted mock orange, ficus, jacaranda and mimosa trees – each of which is notorious for producing an epic amount of detritus. The few times we’ve run it the little waterway swept a HUGE cloud of dried leaves and dust right into the pool for us! Neat! We, uh, don’t use that feature.

In fact, I’ve been working at cleaning up quite a few little surprises the owner has left for us. He planted beautiful mimosa trees on the edge of his pool: they put out a legendary amount of fall…legendary! He buried a perfectly terrific flagstone walkway that bordered the railway under six inches of dirt. I don’t get it.

So, operating with only an idea of a plan, here’s what I’ve done:

-I drained the swimming pool and took out the mimosa trees. The empty pool makes a nice place to store the mimosa detritus, and certainly wouldn’t have survived all this surgery with water in it!
-I uncovered the walkway and piled the dirt in the middle of the southern loop and buried the waterway feature, making a new mountain.
-I built a stone dam across the waterway where it drops into the pool. You’ll see it in the pictures.

I had to kill that waterway feature to protect the pool. My new mountain in the southern loop connects with the four foot mountain already in place, so that the track will now run through a cut. The train will disappear behind my new mountain, adding visual interest to the layout.

The new mountain features a stone ridge along its pool side. This ridge will keep runoff out of the pool, as I will soon line it with concrete. You can see a picture of that ridge.

However, to correctly manage the runoff, I had to knock a hole under the concrete at the end of the southern loop…I’m trying to figure out how to get a realistic culvert in there. You can see a picture of my construction crew working with the dynamite to get through the concrete.

So, I think I’m ready to pour concrete…I’m just afraid to do it yet because I don’t have any plans written down!

As soon as I’ve gotten my plan on paper I’ll share it with you.