Hello, steemians, and welcome to my page, eh!
In between my garden work, I've been trying to get a bit of work done on my little ride on railroad. This is a 7-1/2 inch gauge railroad that I've been messing with for several years now in my spare time. I chose 7-1/2 inch gauge because you can buy commercially produced parts for it, such as wheels and wheel sets that are pre assembled. The gauge is actually pretty popular with people who do this kind of thing. Of course, everything that's available in this gauge is expensive, so I don't have much in the way of parts. Aluminum rail is available for this scale and gauge, but it's expensive, so I've been using steel T posts that I modify to use as rails. I cut the ties from treated 2 X 6s. The steel T posts aren't as good, or easy to work with as the aluminum rail, but when you're poor, you do what you can with what you can get.
I've been trying to expand the length of the railroad, but I've run up against the problem of the natural slope of the yard. A few years ago, I built a raised bed along the fence to have a level area to put the track, and that worked well until I got to the upper end of the yard. The raised bed is not high enough to compensate for the slope at the end of where I built, so I'm attempting to raise the level a bit more by just adding more ballast to the top of the rail bed. That also means adding boards to the side of the raised bed to hold the gravel. I'm doing this a little at a time, but making some progress.
You can see in this picture what kind of a slope I have to deal with on the far end of the line. The slope is fine for a roller coaster, but not so much for a railroad.
My other focus is building a bridge of sorts to extend the railroad past the end of the raised bed at the lower end of the yard. I had to do some digging to get rid of some dirt that I had piled there last year, and clean up the spot a bit.
I'm hauling the dirt away on my modified garden wagon. I built a tilt bed for the wagon last year to make it easier to unload.
I got the area smoothed out so I don't have to mess with it any more. The bridge pier that you see is made with sections of treated 4 X 4 that are screwed together with landscape timber screws.
This is basically what the bridge will look like after I screw everything into place.
I'm planning on adding more sections to the bridge as time and ambition allows for. In the mean time, I need to start adding ballast rock to the raised bed area to raise the level of the rails to match the bridge. I'm going to need to haul a fair amount of ballast rock for that, but not all at once. I can only do so much at a time with my crappy back.
Well, that's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
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