Resurrecting a disused garden railway - the SCGR reborn

Thanks for your replies chaps, appreciated. Sadly weed killer is not an option for me, but the cement solution appears to be working fine albeit with a fair amount of time and effort - and dry weather - required.

Indeed, no skip near me is safe, although I have found it definitely pays to speak to the owner beforehand - mainly as a courtesy, but also to get a hint at what might yet be dug out. When they learn what I am up to with their rubble, they are invariably interested, and they seem to then take more pains to remove these blocks, paviours, slabs etc without breaking them! More often than not they are interested enough to want to come and see for themselves what the railway looks like, as actually happened yesterday.

By contrast I tend not to ask permission of the people who set off fireworks, as they obviously had no great concerns about where their spent rockets fell to earth anyway, so the sticks are fair game! Darned fine building material they are, too.
 
Clive Tucker said:
........... On the way back, I noticed one of my neighbours was merrily filling a skip with all manner of rubble, including Celcon blocks! A quiet word and the promise of a bottle of something suitably fizzy, and they were mine!

Happy days!
Click to expand...

Result!! Now that's what I'd call the perfect end to a perfect day.
Happy birthday

Rik
 
Thanks Rik! Indeed today has been a bit manic, whilst overseeing some scaffolders on site, I was also digging out soil etc to place the slabs down for the goods area. Some of the freebie lumps were duly pressed into service:

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For a bonus, I was able to reinstate a long lost feature of this area: the end dock - cut from a Celcon, which should hopefully do better than the wooden one which rotted away many moons ago.
 
Thanks Phil, it's a bit uneven in places but the ballasting will hopefully disguise that when I get round to it - and the main thing is, it's as proof against weeds as it can be.
 
Having looked and looked at the track as it is now, and after having the same layout since inception (ie 15 years now) I am now not happy with one aspect of it... The goods siding joins the 'main line' with no real chance of shunting without fouling it. So I am thinking of rearranging it so that it joins at the station runaround spur. Only barrier at the moment is, what if any spare track do I have in the shed...
 
I'm not sure 'fun' is the right word here, but I am at least enjoying the buzz that comes with achieving a milestone that, once complete, will hopefully save me from the world of pain that goes with de-weeding my track every few weeks!
 
Keep up the good work Clive weeds were tha bain of my life with my track in France. So I will be taking a few leafs out of your book with my new setup back in the UK.. Where do you get your thermolite blocks from most of them around here seem to have scratched surfaces for plastering?
 
Thanks Peter, I get mine from b&q, although I do also have some from Wickes that have the rougher texture. I usually just scrape them smooth with an ordinary wallpaper scraper.
 
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