Introduction

We moved into our house "Croston" in the market town of Ulverston in December 2001 having just re-married and both bringing lots of "useful" things from our previous lives and homes. My wife, Margaret had a lovely garden at her previous house at Longcroft and she had a useful amount of shaped fence trellising plus copious quantities of plants.

At my previous house I had built a 7 ¼" railway and although I sold the petrol loco I still had all the track in storage. Prior to that I had a 16mm garden line and still had all the locos, rolling stock and track

The garden plot at Croston was based on a typical pre-war semi - much too small for a 7¼" line (and too costly for our resources) so we started planning the garden around a small 16mm line. However it seemed somehow a retrograde step after the fun of building a railway on which the adults could actually have a ride.

Two things happened around this time: I had already started building a Polly 5" gauge steam loco - just to run on our local club line in the park. Secondly I stumbled on Paul Middleton's "Ride on Railways" website, which did indeed prove that a ground level 5" gauge passenger railway was possible. A brief session with the tape measure suggested with some re-working a reasonably interesting line could be built in our garden.

Find your way round the track by selecting the apporpriate link

1. The new upper station.
2. Turntable at upper station.
3. The new gravel garden.
4. Siding to the new carriage shed.
5. A view up from rose tunnel.
6. Overall view of the sharp curve.
7. Layout of the lower station.
8. Ash pit and turntable.
9. Lower station turntable.
10. Carriage shed point.
11. View from the decking to blue/white bed.
12. New lower garden with Polly
13. Crossing scree.

Updated March 2008