March 8: The first version of the Lost Hollow Railway has been decommissioned due to a job-related move. I still hope to make it out to the various steam-ups in the southeast Texas area over the next few months and rebuild the Lost Hollow Railway at our next place.
I learned many things on my first garden railway:
- The hardiplank roadbed system I used worked great for the soil here in Houston. Everything was rock solid and I had no problems with track alignment. Thanks to John Frank for his advice in this area. Details on the hardiplank roadbed system are available here. My only issue was keeping the purely cosmetic ballast in place on top of the hardiplank.
- I put ground zero too low. I should have raised it about 1-2″ more than I did. I had some problems with the lowest level terrain getting filled in with earth from higher points of the layout.
- I should have built retaining walls between the the upper and lower mainlines at several key places. In the center section of the layout, even though the upper and lower mainlines were separated by only 3 inches in vertical height and about 9-12 inches horizontally, I had difficulties keeping the earth on the upper mainline from running down onto the lower mainline. A retaining wall or crib system would have helped.
- Switches were mostly unnecessary for this live steam layout. The small radius Aristocraft ones that I used were probably too small anyways.
- We should have put down a weed/plant barrier in the loop sections of the layout to get a handle on the weeds. The layout got very weedy in the last couple of years.
