If you like garden railways...

Ah Memories

I was taken to Beconskot when I was about eight and was enchanted and pestered my father to take me again. Sadly it was some distance from where I was brought up and we never went again . . . . until about eighteen years ago I bought a house just a few minutes away. One summers day I took my son of eight (then) and he too was captivated by its charm and all the places you could investigate. For me it was a disaster as all my childhood memories were dashed by how scruffy and amateurish it all was. That is not to say a lot of very hard work hasn't been put in over the years. I asked my father, who is dead now, what he thought of it as an adult and a keen hobby engineer. He reflected my adult thoughts almost word for word. I asked him was that why he never took me back. He replied, to my surprise, that he found out that it was run by, in his words. "Some weird religious sect who used it to fund their activities." I never got to the truth of the claims but I won't be going back . . . .but not for the same reason. Today we're a bit more tolerant.

Thanks for the memory Airtime, mixed as it was.

Martin
 
Hi chaps

Glad you enjoyed a trip around our railway! Just saw this site pop up in our web tracking and have been reading a lot of the forums just now.

Martin, I do hope you'll return to see Bekonscot again, 18 years on. I'm a volunteer there and in the 14 years that I've been doing it, I've seen massive changes. Yes, some of the stock is basic, but that's a necessity of them running 16,000 real miles every year, and dealing with small hands and occasional derailments. If the chap who had it commissioned by Bassett-Lowke in the 1920s had realised that 14 million people would visit it over 80 years, he'd probably have briefed the designers to put more room between the paths and the tracks ;)

The stock is more detailed now, and the village has reinvested hundreds of thousands of pounds into refurbishment and reconstruction. I hope you'll get that impression when you look at http://www.bekonscot.co.uk

I have to correct you though on the point that it's run by a cult (!) - as a pretty liberal vague non-religous person I'd have nothing to do with that sort of thing. It's actually run by a charity - the Roland Callingham Foundation (named after the builder of the village) but managed and with a portion of profits donated to the Church Army. That's loosely affiliated with the Church of England (a cult only if you like fetes, jam and scones...) - the Church Army runs a women's hospice in London and a lot of development projects overseas. The rest of our profits go to either local charities (cancer hospices, children's homes, scout groups etc) or bigger ones like children's charities, RNLI etc etc. The little model railway in that video has raised the equivalent of £5 million so far. So our hobby can have a positive impact on loads of people!

There are more vids at http://www.vimeo.com/bekonscot/videos/
And our website is at http://www.bekonscot.co.uk if you fancy a visit in 2010...

Hope this hasn't come across as an advert - just wanted to let you know that we've tried to improve things over the years and we're basically a bunch of grown up kids having a great time running a very special model railway.

tim
 
Wow gardenrailuk, I must say your garden railway is fantastic, and I do like the way you done the camera shot on top of the train, I found the video on You Tube and thought it was too good to be left alone...

Great work guys and keep up the good work...

Joe Airtime
 
Maybe more in time than money. Stuff like that can be easily built with plaster or concrete, stones, donated weatherproof plywood and scrap tin. I could probably build a dozen g-scale houses for the cost of the nails and glue, but to do it in HO could cost over $100 for the stripwood, cladding and glue.

The track is frightfully expensive. Even the rails cost about $5 a metre. Pre built flexible track would cost a fortune. Places like that often use flat bar or get track extruded to keep the price down, but laying it is really time consuming. In my club we built 20 foot lengths of dual gauge 7.25 and 5" track on the work bench then bolted it together on the right-of-way. It took 4 men 8 hours to build one length until we automated it. The same four men could then build ten lengths of greatly improved track in the same time.

We used aluminium rail which cost $40,000 at the the time to do a mile. Today, that would be well over $100,000. When it wore out recently, they were able to source far superior track from Switzerland or Sweden for about $50,000. It will last ten times longer than the aluminium junk.
 
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