The UK’s only magazine that’s 100% dedicated to outdoor railway modelling. Expect to see stunning garden railways from the UK and abroad, expert advice to help you create one of your own, show reports plus product news and reviews.
This month’s issue of Garden Rail features no less than four articles on locomotives in various forms. We’ve vintage ones from David Pinniger, an electric loco that should have been nitro powered by Mick Pagram, ‘Flying Scotsman’ in Gauge 1 by Friso Booij, and something ugly from my own workbench. Even Product News is loco-heavy. All of this is just a coincidence, but it does highlight that we modellers are terrors for focusing on the front of the train, and being less interested in the rolling stock. Looking at the folder full of future articles, I am a bit light on wagon and coach builds, so if you have a project under construction, or are about to start one, please take some photos and send them to me. We pay…
I’ve nearly always had a model railway layout, and when I was able to from the 1980’s, exhibited them at shows local to me. Sometimes it was a layout purely for exhibitions, housed in a caravan, sometimes it was my ‘home’ layout. Mostly OO, sometimes Dublo three rail and sometimes scenic two rail. Then, around 1998, I was bitten by the garden railway bug, and started out with an LGB railway with analogue track power, later converting to digital operation, initially with LGB’s MTS, but I’m currently using Massoth. I now have a permanent near-groundlevel line that is a convoluted figure of eight spread over much of my small back garden. It, as some may say, comes fully stocked, including through stations, terminal stations, platforms, signal boxes, bridges, goods yards,…
Johnson Harbour has two platforms, with the second having two faces. We’re joining at platform 1 for a clockwise journey on the outer line, a short toot on the whistle and pulling away the back straight has a point leading to the aforementioned rack line leading to the lower level garden line, which, of course, doesn’t appear at shows, so houses a sheeted-over loco under repair. There is a chap welding something, he’s been there with his flashing torch for years. Once round the curve, we pass the semi-scenic staging area, then another curve where there is a passing loop. Across the lifting bridge, and back into platform 1. Here, passengers could transfer to platform 3, for a branch train to Johnson Quay, this train is normally a railcar, either…
Before I started to build my railway in 2000, there was a very traditional garden with lawn and formal flower borders. Look at it now! It wasn’t all done at once, but evolved over the years, reaching its current size of 30ft x 24 about 12 years ago. The shed houses my layout, plus there are also storage tracks for both high and low levels, so I can run trains when the weather is too wet or cold outside to run the garden layout. The hard landscaping makes garden maintenance much easier, too. The trackplan was never designed to be like this, it just happened! There is a convoluted single line running at low level that crosses over itself twice, passing at low level through the shed. A separate line…
Garden Rail: You will be a new name to many of our readers, perhaps you could give us a brief introduction? Sinisa Stanisic: My name is Sinisa Stanisic. I am 32 years old, and have been Export Sales Manager at Märklin since July 2022. In this position, I am responsible for most markets or countries outside Germany. In fact, it would probably be quicker to list the countries I am not responsible for – Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France and Italy. GR: But this leaves quite a lot, including the USA. SS: The USA is actually LGB’s biggest export market. We have a company there, Marklin Inc. run by the General Manager, Gale Cousins, since 2016 in Jefferson City, Missouri. GR: Do you have a background with model railways, or is…
Spencer’ started out as a follow-up project to ‘Foxie’, ‘Royal my RC nitromethane (nitro) powered loco featured in Garden Rail May 2019, which got me thinking about the possibilities of a nitro-powered diesel-electric loco. It would need to be a fairly large loco to house the engine, generator control gear and two motors, one in each power truck. What I came up with is very loosely based on the WHR ‘Castle Caernarfon’. Two four-wheel motorised chassis were bought, these had vertical motors, and my thinking was to put thrust bearings around these for the bogie pivots. These were mounted on a piece of plywood with a battery and simple controller to see if it would work. It did sort of, but not very well, the problem being not enough flexibility…
