Page 19 - November December 2013

The Fildid & Wissat RR – a Garden Railway
PART 3: Hard Landscaping – Preparation and Sculpting
Nick Prior
Hard landscaping involves shifting out a lot of soil and shifting in a lot of rock. Our son, Philip, and I knew from previous land­ scaping in this garden that it would be hard work. It is neces­ sary to choose the right rock for the job, but unfortunately you can’t choose the soil to be removed, and building a garden rail­ way on a slope involves removing a lot of soil. Our garden is composed of heavy ‘London’ clay mixed with stones and we had developed a technique for removing soil that absolutely needed Philip’s young arms. We had early on tried using a spade, but the stones stubbornly prevented this from penetrat­ ing the soil. So, Philip would hold the fork in place and I would hit the tines with repeated blows of a sledgehammer before Philip levered out a heavy clod. Some patches were slightly easier, but this remained the general pattern for the whole process.
The relatively small area we had chosen for the railway involved the removal of two rounded 6­yard skip­loads of clay. When the skips were collected the trucks tipped up on their rear wheels despite the stabilisers as the loads were lifted on board. Quite exciting, and thanks to the use of timbers under the skip and stabilisers, the driveway survived.
Before digging started, however, it was necessary to choose the stone that would create the rock faces we hoped would make for a realistic railway landscape.
Choosing the stone
In our travels in the mountain states of the USA we had seen many types and colours of rock, all of which looked stunning in their setting. We had also seen garden railways (in print and in person) using rocks of all shapes and sizes and many colours ranging from almost white through yellow and red to dark grey. I rather liked the yellow and red hues found in parts of Colorado, but as we looked at various garden railways it be­ came apparent that the style, size and colour of the rock found in nature was not necessarily in harmony with a model environment. Careful choice needed to be made. Furthermore, when searching for stone in this country we found that rocks readily available to the garden railroader in the USA were just not available here.
Our initial searches in this country involved a large number of garden centres and builder’s merchants and we did find quite a range of stone available, as you can see for yourself by visiting these outlets. We found, however, that most of the rock avail­ able tended to come in cubist pieces intended for rockeries, and this would not suit our desire to create realistic rock faces. Further, most rocks we found tended to the grey/blue spectrum rather than the lighter, brighter colours often found in the USA.
However, after much searching of the outlets and the soul, we settled on a Welsh slate that seemed to satisfy all of our require­ ments. It came in a range of sizes, had the big advantage that the pieces were generally flat rather than cubist so that it could be stacked into walls representing rock faces, and was beautifully striated so as to show multiple layers within each piece. It was also available as scree and grit (for ballast). Now as I sit here looking at the railway on a bleak, wet day I also realise that it fits well into an English garden. I rather think now that some of the brighter colours found in the US mountain landscape would just not look right in an English garden with English weather.
Having chosen the rock we wanted at a local garden centre, we were faced with paying for it. Garden centres sell rock by the piece (generally at about £3 each), and buying this way was going to be cripplingly expensive in the quantities we required. I did manage to negotiate a per­pallet price with the garden centre but this was still very expensive and we had no control over the size of the rock pieces. Fortunately, we noticed that the bags of grit were printed with the name of a supplier in
Wales. The next step was a trip to Wales to visit the quarrymen. Thus we ended up, on a deviation from a trip home from Cumbria, in Welshpool at the showroom of Borderstone, www. border­stone.com. Here, we were spoilt for choice and found that the slate was graded into pallets of different piece sizes (priced reasonably, so that we could get just the rock we needed). Better still, they would deliver any quantity to our home so long as we were flexible to receive it on their next trip to our area. We therefore arranged for a delivery of five tons of the slate we had chosen. A couple of weeks later a large articu­ lated flatbed arrived carrying our order. The truck had a forklift mounted on the back and this was quickly demounted and used to put the pallets at the top of the drive just where we wanted them, as shown in Photo 1.
It was now time to start digging. However, what we did not realise at this stage but only when we had started digging was that we would need some more slate of different dimensions for the rock face next to the lawn. This is explained below.
Removing the soil
As those of you who read my last article will recall, the Fildid & Wissat occupies a site about 50 feet wide which slopes down from the edge of a flat lawn to a low retaining wall about 4 feet below the lawn level. The slope is 15 feet wide at the left­hand end, narrowing to 11 feet at the right­hand end where a short leg, also sloping, extends away from the lawn at right­angles to the main part. In order to create the right proportions for the three­level railway layout planned (upper and lower loops with an intermediate point to point), the upper level had to be 12–15 inches below the lawn level to result in a realistic height of trestle at the right­hand end of the upper loop.
You will need to remove more soil than you expect, and clay in particular seems to enlarge when it has been dug out. As you will see from Photo 2, the larger pieces of slate we received are between 12 and 20 or so inches wide and up to 15 or more inches deep, so that when you are building a rock face of superimposed slates, at least 15 inches of soil has to be removed just to accommodate the ‘wall’. Thus, in order to create a ledge 20 inches wide you need to cut out at least 35 inches of soil. The initial sculpting of the right­hand end of the site is shown in Photos 3 and 4 where you can see how the top level had to be lowered in front of the lawn, and the soil is being cut away to receive the rock faces behind the intermediate and lower levels. Also seen is the initial work to prepare the river bed, construction of which will be discussed in a later article. Philip, who has a great deal of experience in hard landscaping, also decided that the rock walls should be supported on footings for stability. Accordingly, 6­inch­deep trenches were dug out and filled with concrete as shown in Photo 5, prior to building the rock walls. He also decided that all the stones should be cemented in place, and as a result of these two de­ cisions, after more than seven years there has been no move­ ment of any of the rockwork.
Having purchased the Welsh slate of the dimensions shown and described earlier, we realised once we had started digging that we had a problem with the rock wall we wanted behind the upper level, against the lawn. We needed all the width we could get in front of the lawn to accommodate the upper level without squeezing out the lower level, or stealing more lawn (not an option). If we were to use the Welsh slate, this would use up 15­plus inches of depth, which would cause severe problems with the upper level unacceptably overlapping the lower level. We had to rethink.
After a number of unsuccessful attempts to find an alternative, we came across Silverland Stone at Chertsey, Surrey, a very large wholesaler (and fortunately retailer) of stone and paving of all sorts. The problem was solved when we found here some
december 2013 19