I did venture into a 5inch gauge Makitrak kit locomotive earlier but was beaten by the EU regulations for passenger carrying locomotives combined with my inadequate mechanical skills and equipment.

In 1999, I gave up on this excursion and thought about a garden railway. Our garden consisted of a lawn approx 5m by 6m(16ft by 20ft approx in English money. And a vegetable patch come flower bed of about 5m by 3m ( approx 16ft by 10ft). I started off wanting to have a mainline system, but alas, as soon as you start to take curves etc into consideration this soon showed that this was a pipe dream and not practical on our plot.

The 1st Phase

I was forced to discard, the then developing G3gauge and further downsize in theory but in fact not in practice.. Being a steam enthusiast, I turned to the narrow gauge arena. However I equally wanted to continue using the garden and this suggested to me that I need to use track which would stand the odd wheelbarrow over it, as well as determining that my track need to be mainly at ground level, and when needed carry the weight of someone walking on the track!.

Hence 45mm gauge track was chosen in spite of all the narrow gauge protagonists dictating that only 32mm was true to scale!! None-the-less, after discussions with GRS and PPS, 45mm gauge was settled on and I was introduced to both Peco and Tenmill track.. I felt the former was insufficiently robust for my garden and settled on Tenmill as it could be purchased as rail lengths with separate plastic sleepers, which then had to be made up.

Now, to prepare the ground. A 2.5inch trough about 7insches wide was dug around the lawn and concrete mixes, hand mixed in a bucket, were cast into this trough. The track components were purchased and assembled. As the assembled track was reasonably flexible, this was fixed into place by drilling and raw plugging the concrete at strategic points to take screws through the track. So I had my first track circle( or rather a rectangle with the ends rounded off.) The smallest radius was about 4ft. I had not considered ballast at this stage!

Again after a fair amount of research and visits again to PPS and GRS, I decided that the nearest equivalent to the mainline system I had originally desired was that run by the Campbeltown and Machainrinanish railway.. A Roundhouse Argyll was therefore the locomotive to aim for. This was duly purchased and runs well to this day. Shortly afterwards, I purchased. 2 W & L coach kits from GRS (these were the nearest I could find to the Campbletown and Machainrinanish coaches that was available at that time. They also had the added advantage of being slightly shorter than the true C & M coaches, as I was concerned over the loading gauge as well as the tight corners.

John Tomlin.