Introduction and Planning
A brand new Caradoc (still in ‘Hornby clockwork’ guise!) waits at Butternowle, while Dill is busy shunting wagons.
This is the warm, comfortable bit. Aspirations and dreams. Thinking out loud and disconnected ramblings...
This page isn't complete yet, but the following sections will give you some idea of how the HLR got started. Before you visit the rest of the site, some explanations are probably in order anyway.
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Introduction
Our humble abode sits in the SE corner of a roughly rectangular sloping plot in beautiful Winchester, capital of Wessex (southern England, if you must).
We arrived here in the summer of 1999 after many years of moving from one part of the country to another. I had dabbled with model railways ever since I was a child; the days of Hornby clockwork and Trix Twin Railways. I had latterly become fascinated by narrow gauge railways, and eventually found myself a member of the 009 Society. However, I'd had a growing yearning for something more substantial, something ‘real’; i.e. live steam in the garden. If I had to pick a ‘defining moment’, I think it would be this picture in the Garden Railways book by Peter Jones. I wanted one just like it!
But my aspirations were always being frustrated by the prospect of another move. So, when we finally arrived here, with every likelihood of staying put, the garden was very soon being looked at with a particular aim in mind - though little idea of how to proceed!
There was one thing that I was quite fortunate in, though. Historically, the owners of the land through which any new railway pass usually seem to put up a bit of a fight, if only to extract a good price for the land. The situation here was not so different, but the issue was settled very amicably; my wife said I could do what I liked, so long as the railway blended in, and I did the gardening. Seemed fair to me, as I like being in the garden anyway!
Very roughly (and definitely not to scale!), this is the basic shape of the garden. It slopes down from SW (top left) to NE (bottom right).
What I did become increasingly aware of, was that I wanted to run a ‘proper’, albeit rather small, railway. So, along with the real civil engineering and real nuts and bolts, it needed a location, a history, and a reason for existing. It naturally had to be narrow gauge, British, fairly bucolic, and it had to ‘look right’ in its setting. I was therefore inexorably led to 16mm scale (1:19) and 32mm gauge. Without getting too contentious, ‘G’ scale looked a little too broad gauge to my mind, and seemed pretty much synonymous with LGB and continental/American railways; not for me! If I'd known it even existed as a recognised scale, maybe I should have thought about 7/8" (1:13.7) scale! But with a few notable exceptions, it's still mostly American.
My initial thoughts were to create something local and completely fictional. Then I became increasingly aware of the railways around Shildon, the famous railway town in County Durham, where Sandra, my wife, grew up. In particular, my interest was attracted to the branch line which used to run fron St Helens Auckland, along the Gaunless valley and across Cockfield Fell (where her grandparents lived) to a terminus at Butterknowle. It was variously known as the Butterknowle branch or the Haggerleases branch, and was originally part of the Stockton & Darlington Railway. I'll describe some of its history later, but, suffice it to say, it was a five mile long branch, mostly serving various coal mines, although it did carry passengers for a brief spell. The line is now closed and the rails lifted, but it's an ideal location for a rejuvenated, narrow gauge railway!
Well, the history pages will tell you all about how the Haggerleases Light Railway came to be. But first, some practicalities. Like, how do I create it in our back garden?
From fantasy to reality
The ground slopes down from SW to NE so the house is roughly halfway up a hill, leaving an ‘L’-shaped garden which has its ‘peak’ behind the house and slopes down across the back and down the side of the house.
How to navigate this steeply sloping, Hampshire chalk-pit of a garden? The slope is far too steep to allow the railway to go directly downhill; indeed the garden is too small for any gradient reasonable for steam engines to be of much significance compared with the slope of the ground.
This being the case, it was obvious that a fair amount of earth moving was going to be required, as I was working on the basis of keeping everything more-or-less flat, at least to begin with.
So, at what level in the garden should the railway be constructed? When we moved here, there was already a waterfall through a mature rockery at the back of the house running down into a largish pond at about the level of the patio. We decided to start by building a small circle (about 15 yards round) on this ‘hillside’ in the corner of the garden: along the far side of the pond on an embankment, travelling around 'behind' the waterfall through a cutting, past a small halt (Cockfield Fell) at about ground level then crossing the waterfall to join back up and make a complete loop. A junction allows a line to extend on to the patio at a comfortable 18 inches above ground level to form another station (Butterknowle).
The diagram should make everything as clear as the mud in the bottom of the cutting.
Phase 1
The cutting utilises a previous path which was already a little below ground level. This meant creating a new path further up the hill. Our son Andrew did much of the hard digging during the summer of 1999. The earthworks were finished by spring 2000 and track laying completed by the end of the summer. Although the circuit is short, it is impossible to see all of it at once, so it feels quite a bit longer than it really is.
The pictures below (sorry - not taken with a very good camera and a bit blurred; will do better next time!) give some idea of what this area of the garden looked like after some of the levelling of the trackbed had been done, but before serious construction had started. The letters correspond to those on the diagram above.
Click on a picture to see a larger version, showing the proposed course of the railway.
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You'll eventually find details of the construction methods for this section on the Construction pages. (But like many things associated with the HLR, this one's still under construction!)
Big red
herring
By the end of this, there was a 15 yard circle with a terminus at Butterknowle, and a siding at Cockfield Fell. The intention was to eventually turn this ‘siding’ into part of a ‘Y’ and extend it down the garden going northwards, to a return loop in the NW corner. In fact this was the plan for quite a while, until I realised just how far off the ground the railway would be at its fullest extent. The idea of a railway on stilts marching round the garden did not go down very well with the authorities. This diagram shows roughly what I had in mind at the time.
Next - St Helen Auckland
For various reasons, a 15 yard circle remained the full extent of the HLR for some while as I became increasingly uneasy about my plans.
But the fact that the pond started to leak in 2001, led to a rethink anyway. The northern edge of the pond had to be rebuilt as a matter of priority, and I took the opportunity to redesign this part of the garden so as to incorporate a new terminus for the other end of the line () alongside the pond. This would become St Helen Auckland (otherwise known as St Helens), the eastern terminus of the HLR in reality.
Progress on the construction of St Helens is detailed in the Construction section and there are various ramblings in the Journal too. But as this station is 11" lower than the main circuit, it does mean that I will have to lay a considerable length of track before I can join up the termini!
Gradients and curves
So, just how much track will I have to lay, to gain 11"? Obviously the two things which slow down an engine are gradients and curves. In building the original circuit, I had managed to avoid radii of less than 4'6" (at least intentionally!) and determined to set this as the minimum radius for running lines elsewhere too. But what about gradients, which I had so far avoided (though the engines told me otherwise)? How much will a gradient affect a manually powered Caradoc or Jane? I had some experience of driving both of these on Tony Lea's W&LLR, but that is a quite large system with sweeping curves and gradients not much steeper than 1 in 100. In the end, I stuck a finger in the air and settled on a maximum gradient of 1 in 70, or more conveniently, 1/2" in a yard.
That means I notionally need 22 yards to get from the new St Helens station up to the original circuit. I reckon that across the garden and back should do it, but it'll take a bit of building, with some sort of viaduct across the lawn and another (removable) bridge (carrying tracks at two levels!) across the main path. More deliberations and delicate negotiations needed! I'll add my thoughts here as they develop. Meanwhile I'll keep busy with track laying at St Helens and finishing the station there.