How it all began
In August 2007 my sons and I acquired Grasmere, an early example of a 5" gauge Maxitrak Simplicity. More than twenty years old, she still had her original wiring, no electronic controller and a liberal coating of grease and fluff as well as a few scrapes. But we thought she was great. We still do.
We cleaned her, painted her and rewired her. Then we decided to build a railway so that we could run her.
Maxitrak sold us the rail, chairs, screws and fishplates to make up a ten metre length of track which we laid across the patio. Fun though it was, this wasn't enough. Partly because we had to `puppy walk her' as we didn't yet have anything to ride on.
Christmas took care of that, with the purchase of a partly-assembled driving truck from Ride on Railways. Eventually we stopped playing long enough to finish and paint it and spent many happy hours trundling up and down.
Thanks to visits to other railways such as the Little Orchard Railway, Willow Wood Railway and the Middleton Garden Railway and conversations with the people who built them, by the summer of 2008 we felt ready to start our own line...
As we already had a shed we thought would make a pretty good station/engine shed, we painted it green and put a new door on.
But that was only the beginning...