It’s been more than one and a half years, since I last posted on the garden railway. In the meantime I decided to remove it. The reasons are simple: no time, no money, too many ambitions.
Garden railways are expensive on both accounts. Paul Race recently published a very good article on his wonderful website: Which Comes First, the Garden or the Train? One of his core arguments is:
Initially you should plan to spend over twice as much on track as you do on trains. And over twice as much on your garden and landscaping as you do on the trains and track put together.
I concur. Besides the financial aspect I didn’t (couldn’t?) take enough time to work on the railway. And so it came during spring that my wife mentioned the perpetual construction site, which really was no pretty sight to see.
Those two reasons motivated me to remove the tracks, take the laid stones out of the earth and undo the weed barriers. As I have mentioned in breaking ground, the railways concept was based on a easy-and-fast construction. It has held up well over the last two years. I can only recommend it and I will take up on it again. For some day, I do want to have a garden railway.
So much on time and money. What about those ambitions? I fell into the classic pit fall: starting on lots of good (and expensive) ideas, before the fundamentals were set. For instance experimenting with code 250 tracks, while the first loop wasn’t even finished. “If I pause construction now, I can have nicer looking tracks on the front side” evolved to “I totally need a few nice switches in code 250!” And in no time, half a year was spent on saving up instead of making progress.
I did learn some lessons. I will elaborate on them next time.