Building the NM&RC

[Svein]

Back to our own garden railway project, and an update.

A couple of months ago there was a landslide at the neighbour's property just under 100 meters away, and several tons of soil went down into the river and almost blocked it completely. The neighbours were evacuated, and geologists came to survey the situation. In case the ground conditions here was the same as at the neighbour's property, we were strongly advised against putting any more load on top of our back yard, as it could cause the entire slope down towards the river to collapse! So much for our plans to fill the inside of the layout with all the sand and gravel we had piled up in the driveway...

Anyway, we talked to our other neighbour, who had assisted in building our house back in 1955, and he could inform us that there had been another landslide at the neighbours earlier, just a couple of years after their house was built (also in 1955). Even though the slope towards the river is much steeper at our place, there had never been any indications of any movement in the ground, and apparently our ground conditions are a lot more stable than at the neighbours place.

Still, to be on the safer side, we decided to go for a more lightweight approach. The stone framing around the layout was abandoned, as was the sand/gravel filling. We'll just have to find another place to put all that stuff, or simply have it hauled away. We went with vertical paneling for the framing, and lightweight EPS bags to fill the inside of the framework. Here are some pics of what has been done the last couple of weeks:

Finished the track bed and paneled the outside walls (the area without paneling will be replaced with an old style wooden trestle):







Removed all the old sand/gravel filling and replaced it with lightweight EPS bags:







We have also tried out different types of aquarium gravel for ballast, plus a couple of which we have sifted ourself:

Aquarium ballast #1:



Aquarium ballast #2:



Aquarium ballast #3:



Aquarium ballast #4:



Siftet ballast #1:



Sifted ballast #2:



Svein