Building The Garden Railway, Part 11, A Short Extension

Hello, hivers!

It's time for another post about building my garden railroad!

In my last post about my garden railroad, I talked about moving some of the track, and doing some ballast work. In this post, I'd like to tell you about a short track extension that I put on the track where it ends by the alley. I did this bit of work in September.

The end of the track at the back garden gate had not been as useful as I had wanted it to be because it didn't extend very far under the gate. That made it a bit more difficult to load the flatcar from the back of my vehicle to carry heavy stuff into the yard. Because of that, I decided to build a short extension to the end of the track. I didn't want to build a longer extension at that time because I park my vehicle back there and I didn't want to be driving over the track. I could set up a longer extension to be able to drive over it, but that would require more work and materials than I was interested in at the time.

This was the end of the track before I built the extension. As you can see, it barely went under the gate. This was at the beginning of August.

I had done a bit of work around the track end in August, mostly extra bricks under the gate to close up the gaps under the gate, and a bit of dirt work.

The first thing I had to do to put in the track extension was to clear everything out of the way, and scrape the ground flat before laying the new weedblock cloth down. With the gate closed, you can see how short the end of the track was.

Then I laid out the new piece of weed block cloth with landscape blocks for the borders of the track. This keeps the ballast gravel from sinking into the dirt over time, and stops the grass from growing up into the track.

Here's the short track section set in to check the space for it. I made this track section by cutting one of the T posts in half and using the halves to build the section.

This is after I connected the track section and put some ballast under the ties to support the track.

As you can see, the short extension makes it easier to load the flatcar. The block work and ballasting was not quite done in this picture.

Here's the track extension, as done as it's going to get until next year.

I have 2 choices for any further extension of this end of the track. I could build a track section to use as a temporary extension, just hooking it up and supporting it when I need it. If I want it to be more permanent, I'll need to haul in some driveway gravel to build up the parking area. That way, I can embed the track so that it's in the driveway instead of on top of the driveway. That would be like a road crossing of a railroad. Of course, that's a lot more work and cost. I guess I'll consider the possibilities next spring after the snow melts.

That's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!