Having second thoughts about my clever “cheap fleximount” idea for attaching the track to the brick. What if the track moves around the washer until the washer obstructs the flangeway? Derailments. Calamity. Public inquiries, media outrage…no, getting carried away there. It’ll be the peaked cap next. But not good anyway.

I guess I could chicken out and put a screw through the sleeper like everyone else does. But I don’t want that degree of rigidity since it will doubtless cause gaps when the track expands or contracts.

I really, really need some track to test all this. Where’s the eBay fairy when you need her?

Well, I now have a short trench lined with weed control fabric and filled with 10mm gravel plus a brick.

Behold, I am the natural heir to Capability Brown.

The last two weekends, I cleared two stretches of border around the lawn, removing all the weeds and plants that might as well be weeds so far as we’re concerned. Then I dug a couple of short lengths of trench around the top edges, just because…

P’shaw! You don’t dig trenches without some idea of what to put in them. Next on the list: weed control fabric, gravel and bricks.

After carefully rejecting all but one of the possible construction methods out of hand, I’ve settled on the most basic option of floating the track on a bed of gravel.

So apparently, I’m going to build a railway in my garden. Welcome to my mid-life crisis!

If you happen to have a decent-sized garden, one of these looks like it would be a lot of fun, non?