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.
It’s all happening in garden railway show world at the moment. Last month, we enjoyed a weekend at the Midlands Show, and now it’s time to look forward to The National Garden Railway Show at Stoneleigh Park. Each year, we attempt to build a real garden in the hall, with a very simple trackplan, to prove to anyone needing convincing that a railway in the garden is achievable. Garden Rail is all about getting you, our readers, modelling and enjoying your hobby, so we like to prove that we’re not afraid of getting our hands dirty - literally, in this case, as we use real soil and gravel! The show itself is located in the middle of the country, with plenty of free parking, and always worth a visit as…
My garden railway has no prototype; it’s not based on an existing light railway company. I simply call it the ‘Hydrangea Field Railway’, or HFB for short, because it runs around my wife’s hydrangea bed. A Feldbahn, is the German term for a narrow-gauge field railway. These are not usually open to the public but provide transportation of agricultural, forestry (Waldbahn) and industrial raw materials such as wood, peat, stone, earth and sand. I have been building model field railways since 1993. At first, I worked in the scales 1:64 (S scale), 1:120 (TT), 1:160 (N) and 1:87 (HO). Narrow gauge railways have existed in HO for many years, but in 1993, I saw a magazine article on converting a HO chassis and the construction of a beautiful layout in…
Each issue of Garden Rail delivers: • Innovative Layouts: Explore stunning layouts to inspire your next project • Step-by-Step Guides: From basic setups to advanced scenery. • Exclusive Features: Interviews, reviews, and the latest products. SAVE £19.92 A YEAR! PAY JUST £12.99 EVERY 3 MONTHS SUBSCRIBE TODAY www.bit.ly/GDRMAGS25 *Offer is for a UK Direct Debit or continuous card payment option for UK residents. Other rates are available for overseas, visit the link above. Offer ends 12.06.25.…
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The Archangel ‘Jack’, which I described in Garden Rail 367, was a pioneer of 16mm coal firing, but driving it was not for the faint-hearted. Although there were a few skilled specialist model engineers like Hugh Saunders who built coal-fired locos, they were only made to special order. In the early 1990s, Shawe Steam Services was well known in Gauge 1 and the larger model engineering scales for high-quality work and John Shawe decided to offer a coal-fired conversion of a commercially available 16mm loco. His first venture was a rebuild of a Merlin Mayflower, which he called ‘Black Diamond’, and although it ran well, it was quite small, and John wanted to build a larger loco with a tender. After investigating the quality of the model engineering, he decided…
I’m in the slightly paradoxical position of being someone who enjoys making garden-scale models but doesn’t yet have a garden railway on which to run them, meaning I also haven’t got anywhere to photograph my creations either. In the past, I’ve made do with laying track straight in flower beds, then moved on to laying rails on planks with a tiny bit of scenic detailing. This has evolved to the point I’m at now, where I’ve built something that’s part way between a photographic set and a micro layout… Planks one and two The first two photoplanks were built not long after we moved into our new-build house, which didn’t have much of a garden, and described last month, so I won’t repeat myself. Lessons were learned, though. To make…
