"Building a Railway Wonderland: Tales from an Italian Garden Railway amidst the Alps"

We recently received this from a customer. Interesting to note the temperature range that the bar chairs are subjected to, especially in relation to our recent post about their use in Canada. Many thanks for sending this in.

“My son's garden railway is in Northern Italy close to the foothills of the Alps. It is, at the moment, an end to end run of about 155 yards in length with a passing loop of about 15 yards, but there is ample space to extend this to a continuous loop of about 400 yards. Family matters are ensuring that progress is very slow, but I know that I have taken out enough of your bar stock chairs to get at least 2/3 of the track built! Initially the track was laid on homemade concrete sleepers, but these were very time consuming to cast and have had a small mortality rate over the years. Following a rethink about half the track has been laid on plastic 'timber' purchased locally.

The track bed under the sleepers is at least 4" deep, sometimes in a trench, sometimes on hard core, with about another 1.5" ballast around the sleepers. In 10 years since the first lengths were laid nothing has moved significantly despite temperature variation from -15C to 35C regularly and -20C to 40C in extremes. Just for your interest the long straight is 70 yards long with the bottom half on a 1 in 50 gradient and the top half at 1 in 40. I will attach or send some photos of the railway for your general interest and do not object to information from this letter and the odd photo being used by you.

The blue loco featured in one of the photos is my phoenix Locos Titan 5 "Alpine Courier" which I have taken over there on 3 occasions to give it a change of scenery. Purely for you own amusement in these rather boring times, if you look up 'Alpine Courier' on YouTube then find the one labelled Bellaria Alpine and Northern, this was filmed over the full length of my sons railway one lovely afternoon when we had nothing better to do than play with trains and cameras!”

We really do enjoy reading about your installations and seeing your photos, so please do send them in or post on our Facebook page.