I was beginning to worry that the two weekends work so far would be all I would accomplish until Spring 2009, given that summer now appears to have briefly come and gone and we have settled back into watching the rain sheeting across the valley. Plus, much time has been spent recently battening down the hatches for a long, cold winter with high heating bills.

However, we did have an hour spare at the end of yesterday where the rain held off and, urging the navvies fiercely on in the finest spirit of Stephenson, I was able to fill in the other bit of trench.

Here’s the trench, complete with bricks - no thanks to the navvies, who seemed keener on using their new trowels to scatter gravel over the soil.

One of the bricks also has a plug and screw in it, ready for track-fixing. This was purely to test whether our ancient electric drill was up to the task, as I once nearly burnt it out trying to drill into a solid Victorian housebrick. But you could view it as Sculptural Art too - the screw is Peace, intruding into the Space represented by the brick as Marxism, with the gravel flowing around it to show Clubcard Points. Or sommat.

In the course of doing all this, the GRA’s real interest in the railway slipped out - she sees it purely as a means towards gaining the garden feature of her dreams, namely a railway sleeper. I tried to break it gently to her that the whole “16mm scale” thing means that the sleepers are about the size of her little finger, but it turns out she wants a full size eight foot sleeper to form a flower bed above the track (usefully holding back the soil on the slope). There’s a salvage yard in Newport that nicks sells them, apparently (probably fresh off the Cardiff-London main line). I guess I’d better add this to the spreadsheet, since it’s clearly non-negotiable.

So that’s two sections of trackbed completed, barring the corner joining them (for which I need the curved track to mark out the course). This has highlighted a gentle gradient running up and towards the east of the lawn. Again, not sure how to tackle this:

• Put everything at the lowest level, which will effectively mean the line running in a cutting below the lawn on two sides. This doesn’t sound very appealing.
• Put everything at the highest level, which will require some kind of embankment across the lawn. This sounds like a recipe for accidents and mudslides on the line, mostly involving Tilbo The Destroyer.
• Muddle through, roughly following the ground contours and hoping the locos can handle it, and then rejigging things if they can’t. The line of least resistance giving the Line of most (rolling) resistance.

I think at this point, I need a proper plan. More on this anon.

(Btw: Barry, if you’re reading this, stop at once ‘cos Pamela says you’re supposed to be building an extension instead.)