Building The Garden Railway, Part 9, Finishing The Back Curve

Hello, hivers!

In my last post about building my garden railroad, I talked about putting weed barrier cloth under more of the railroad, and putting ballast rock between the ties on the railroad. In this post, I'll be talking about finishing the work on the big curve at the back end of the garden by the alley.

In part 7 of this series, I wrote about building the curve, but it was still unfinished at that time. This is the last picture from that post. You can see that there's no weed barrier cloth under part of the track, and no ballast rock on that part of the track.

When I decided to finish the weed cloth under this end of the garden, I decided to use some heavy duty weed cloth that had been under the end of the old railroad, so I brought it over to the area and started removing the track panels so that I could lay out the weed cloth.

After some work to prepare the area, I laid out the weed cloth and started putting the track panels back in place. I hauled some buckets of ballast gravel to the work area with my garden wagon. That seems to be easier for me than using a wheelbarrow for that job.

I put the last curve section back in place and continued to spread ballast around the track. Some of the ballast went under the ties in this area to support the track on the uneven ground.

You can see how much of a gap there was between the track and the ground in this area. The ballast under the ties supports the track in this area.
You can also see my work with landscape blocks and dirt by the gate post for the back gate.

I decided to dump a bunch of ballast on the weed cloth and leveled it out before putting the last track section back in place. I knew that it would be necessary to support that section of track.

After spreading the gravel, I put the track section back in place on top of the gravel. I was attempting to get the rails level at the end of the curve so that the straight section would be more or less level. My helper was not really being very helpful. She was distracted.
I also added the landscape edging blocks to hold the ballast gravel in place and to hold down the edges of the weed cloth.

Another afternoon of work got the landscape blocks into place at the end of the track. The end blocks help to keep the ballast in place.

This work was all dun during the first 2 weeks of July. The boards are between the rails and outside of each rail as a "railroad crossing". The boards make it much easier to roll things like the lawn mower or a wheelbarrow over the track.

I did some further work to this end of the railroad, but not until September, when I decided to make a couple of improvements to the end of the track. I'll cover that work in another post. My next post about the railroad will be about further general work such as ballast work and edge blocks.

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