Andy's Garden Railway Guide
Trains...
You are in Andy's Garden Railway Guide. If you've arrived here directly from someone else's site, or from a search engine, please visit the home page.
On this site, there's lots of useful information about building a railway outdoors in 16mm/ft, and my own experiences.
There's some information about larger scales here
Below are all sorts of fascinating things about trains and railways, not necessarily in model form. Other things that fascinate me in can be found on the Insane Engineering page.
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Unusual Trains Archaeology using Google Maps Shunting with a Forklift Coffee Burning locos Shanghai Maglev |
Industrial Archaeology using Google Maps
A scar on the hillside and some ventilation towers, found whilst searching Google Maps, shows where a tunnel was built. This appears to be Kilsby tunnel just outside Daventry, east of Rugby.
© Google Maps. Click to View Larger Map
At first glance, the line across the hill, and the present field boundaries suggest the tunnel was a cut-and-cover job, but other resources suggest it was tunnelled. Perhaps the features along the top show the remains of a haulage road used during construction.
Zoom in, and follow the tunnel (which runs diagonally from the top-left to the bottom-right, if you haven't yet found it). Read the Wikipedia entry, and find out more.
Unconventional shunting
March 2008:Here's an interesting way of shunting wagons about. It strikes me that it has more in common with the "hand from the sky" shunting found at model railway exhibitions, than with a real railway, and looks like it'll be a bit rough on the rolling stock!
Andrew Chambers has more photos of shunting using a forklift truck and a digger on his Fotopic site. The entertaining sequence starts here
Burning Coffee as Loco Fuel
January 2008
A long time ago, someone told me that the Brazillians use Coffee beans in their steam locos at some point. It's true!
The background seems to be related to the Great Depression (~1929). There was a massive over-supply of coffee following the stock market crash, and suddenly nobody wanted to buy the stuff any more. The price plummetted and coffee was stockpiled, unsellable. Someone had a great idea that, instead of just throwing it in the sea to dispose of it, one could burn it in locomotives.
Compressed Coffee Bricks : loco fuel.
The use of coffee as a fuel was reported in "Popular Science" in December 1932. A cutting can be found here. I should think it smelled wonderful.
Shanghai Maglev. 250mph.
October 2007:Here's a video of the Shanghai Maglev, taken in 2007. This train reaches 250 mph (that's just over 400 km/h). That's insanely fast! It's twice the speed of the fast trains in the UK, and faster than the TGV.
© 1999-2008 Andy Watkins andy@wis.co.uk