Summertime is approaching fast (or for my southern hemisphere friends, you've missed the opportunity), and thoughts to modelling tend to be lost because all of those of us who have a garden have to tend them. I know that I would rather be sitting in front of a layout driving in the branch passenger to the bay platform, but the loft is far too hot and the complaints are coming thick and fast from the wife that the grass needs mowing, and these need planting, and that has to go to the refuse dump and so on .... but it doesn't have to be like this !
Just take five minutes off from your PC staring at this and survey your garden (I'm cheating - I'm writing on my 386 portable connected to a long mains lead IN the garden !)
So what do you see - garden shed, flower beds, grass, garden pond - not a great place for TT is it ..... or is it !
I can't remember whose outdoor layout it was, but some of the techniques of the DMNS (Don's miniature New Street - Don Jones in the Midlands has a serious set-up occupying sheds and garden, and he has open days !) have been considered in this proposal.
Just think of lengths of timber with trackwork nailed to it set up over the flower beds, across the pond and into the shed (cut holes with removable doors and you can close them in winter) - now visualise what you could achieve if you designed the garden around the fitting of these sections, or worked the two together. I can already see a possibility of a decent 14m out-and-back section that can be merely disconnected and put away after the trains stop running in my own garden, and another section of 8m across the top and 14m down the side gives a track run point-to-point of 72m !!!
How about a small station in the shed, and that train goes out and comes back after about five minutes !
So the next question would be expense - all that trackwork.
Well the track doesn't have to look really good, and I'm sure that Terry Smallpiece has a few thousand metres of A-track that you could re-rail with nickel-silver (even if he has skipped the last lot, I'm sure there will be more!) and nail down to your boards, or alternatively the Society flexible track would do just as well.
If you ensure that each section is connected up with plug-in power connectors, and well fed from a high-output supply, then the volts-drop problem would lessen and the trains would also get a good run - what better way to run in those sticky mechanisms than twenty minutes thundering around the garden.
Double-heading would be in.
Fourteen coach trains would be in.
Tail-chasing would be non-existent.
The kids would go out into the garden, instead of watching TV !
Now back to the garden. While you're pottering around digging and mowing, you're designing your garden layout in your head - get the ideas down on paper and do just one section at a time.
When the gardening is done, the trains come out - and when the sun goes in, retire to the shed murmuring something about transplanting seedlings and re-organise your stock back into order on the shed section !!
Now that's what I call really playing trains!
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May 1999