Hello, and welcome to my page!
It's been a long time since I've written anything about my outdoor railroad. The last post about it was last spring. In case you're curious about that, you can read the post here.
https://steemit.com/hobbies/@amberyooper/finishing-the-spring-work-on-the-backyard-railroad
My outdoor railroad project is something that I've been messing around with for about 5 or so years now. The rails are spaced 7 and 1/2 inches apart, making it wide enough to have cars that you can easily ride on. You can do real work with a 7-1/2 inch gauge railroad, hauling things like firewood or garden supplies. In this case, the railroad is something that I do simply for amusement, it's not really useful for much else where it's located, up against the fence in the back yard.
Last fall, I moved my camper trailer up into the back yard as far as I could, to have it out of the way. I had to park it close to the raised bed that the railroad is built on so that it wouldn't be too close to the back of the greenhouse. I had to leave enough room for the snow to slide off the back of the greenhouse. Because of where I parked the trailer, I had to walk on the rail bed to get to the door of the trailer. That didn't seem like a problem at the time, but then we got 2 feet of snow and I had to keep the roof of the trailer from collapsing. That meant getting inside the trailer, which meant shoveling a path across part of the railroad to get to the trailer door.
In the process of shoveling to get to the trailer door, I realized that I had parked my little railroad car right in the way. There was no way to move the railcar without digging it out of the snow. It was buried pretty well, as you can see from this picture. You can see the corner of the car sticking out of the snow here.
I figured that the easiest way to move the railcar out of the way would be to just dig out the rails and roll it out of the way. The problem with that idea was how to get the snow out of that narrow space, and where to put the snow that I dug out. The first thing I had to do was to dig a good path to that area from in front of the trailer. That way, I could at least get at the pile easier.
The next step was to figure out how to move the snow. There was no place close to put the snow, there was already a big pile in front of the trailer from pulling it off the roof. I have a sled that I bought for moving snow and this seemed like a good place to use it. I used the sled to move the snow out to the garden area where there's a lot more space for it.
I managed to get enough of the snow moved out of that area to get the railcar out the snowbank.
I didn't want to leave the railcar sitting there because it was still going to be in the way of getting through there. That meant that I had to move the 2 totes and the metal frame that were sitting in the way of moving the car further down the rails. I put the 2 totes on the railcar so that I could get them out of the way of clearing the rest of stuff sitting on the rails.
I ended up pushing the railcar up to the door of the trailer and putting the 2 totes of stuff inside the trailer to get them out of the way. Then I was able to move the rest of the stuff off the rails. That gave me enough space to park the railcar out of the way.
A couple of days later, I decided to dig the rest of the snow out of the space between the fence and the trailer, to make it easier to get through there if I needed to get in the trailer again. I decided to use a tote on the railcar to move the snow to the front of the trailer where I could dump it in the sled to take it out to the garden area.
It took several days to get the entire project completed, I only worked on it for a couple of hours each day. I did manage to get all the snow removed from the area, so now I can get through there without a struggle. The rails end before you get to the white barrel in the picture.
I thought about digging out more of the railroad, but it's just the beginning of winter and I know that we're going to get more snow, and I don't think I want to maintain that much track all winter. Shoveling this much is more than I would normally want to do, but at least there's a reason to shovel this part out.
Well, that's all I have for this post. Thanks for stopping by to check it out!