Early Spring Work On The Garden Railroad

Hello, hivers!

It's been a bit of a struggle for me to come up with something to write about lately. It's not so much that I had nothing to write about, it's been more a matter of end of winter blahs and lack of ambition to focus on writing here on hive. The late winter blues tend to do that to me.

The past several days have been rather nice with the day time temperature rising to about 50 degrees F. It's starting to feel like spring outside, and that has had a definite positive effect on my mood. I've spent the past few afternoons outside doing a few things. There's not much I can really do outside yet because there's still snow on the ground, and the melting has everything wet and muddy. One good thing is that the snow has melted off my railroad enough that I could use it again if I wanted to.

Today, I decided to do a bit of work on the railroad, to get a headstart on the spring work. I wanted to start working on the turnout that I didn't do much with last year. I had built the start of the turnout last year as part of building the railroad. This year I'm planning on building the track to the area where I keep the firewood for the fire ring that's in the yard. This is the part of the turnout that I had put in place last year. The straight rail ends at the snow pile. I need to start by adding the other straight rail to continue building the turnout.

Shitaki is the track inspector.

I had to measure the approximate length for the piece of rail that I need to put in place, and then cut the rail to fit.

Then I had to test fit the piece of rail, and grind off what was needed to make it fit properly.

It took a bit of grinding to get the proper shape for the new piece of rail to fit against the other piece of rail.

I managed to get the piece of rail to fit nicely, and then I screwed it in place on the ties.

The next step in this process will be to add the piece of straight rail on the inside of the curve section, and cut the notch in the curved rail for the wheel flange to pass through. I'm not too sure when I'll be able to do that, it depends on how the weather is over the next several days. I'm not in a hurry to get it done, it just seemed like a good thing to start on a nice day when there's not much else I can do outside yet.

That's all I have for this post, thanks for checking it out!