Seibiant Hill Railway

In future a description of the route will be written here, but for now we have a movie to show the route as it was in September 2008:

The Seibiant Hill Railway like many railways was built and then re-built in to it's present state on the same site. At the begining I had some mamod track, a pile of bricks & some chippings so my friend & I (very eager) begun on an attempt at building a 32mm gauge garden railway, on a sloped garden using bricks for a base. This was much to steep for my tiny locos. Inevitably the weeds grew up strapping the track to the bricks and we found that we had failed at building a railway.


It looked a bit like this when under construction

After being disapointed at the previous year's work I decided that 2007 was to bring a new, better start! So I layed a series of breeze blocks in the soil (or mud, it was Janurary!) to form near level trackbed, ocassionaly using old concrete lintels as a money saving option. The layout was a simple oval with a short 'branchline' to a pair of sidings, mostly limited by the fruit bushes. The 32mm gauge mamod track was then nailed too these blocks.
The result was this:


I felt the need to smarten it up a bit, so we purchsed some log roll and nailed it to the side of the breeze blocks, I then thought "Why not pour ballast in the gap?". This looked good for the first week, but after that it started to disapear.

It did however result in some sections looking like this:


Before I finished the oval I decided it was all ready time to extend! The extension runs up the side of the garden coming off in a 90 degree turn at the end of the branchline to the sidings. At the end it meets the wall of the house at about the second floor level, no the railway isn't steeply graded, the garden is, here there is a short run round loop and station called 'Seibiant Isaf'. The track along this section is Peco SM32 apart from the loop points which are Tenmille wooden sleeper ones. I am in great debt to my good friends Terry & Jonathan Newhouse for their help in the construction of this section.

I still wasn't happy with the loop line the Mamod track with it's track joined at sleepers not rail joining system caused no end of silly de-railments. So in the (very wet) Summer of 2008 the Mamod track was lifted, and some breeze blocks re-aligned due to the radi of the different turnouts. I am lucky enough to be friends with the Pen-Morfa Quarry Light Railway who had aquired large quatities of chaired track from a certain vintage railway of which the owner was very unwell, and enough to relay the line was donated to the Seibiant Hill Railway under the condition that I constructed them a new electric loco in the form of a 40hp Simplex and use the knowledge I gained from dismantling the track to curve it in the construction of their new 'main line'. A very crude 2ft 6in radius rail bender was created from a piece of wood and some screws to curve the rail, the sleepers were then cut in to pairs on their battons and rail returned to their chairs this creates a sort of wooden flexitrack.

Holes were drilled in the breezeblocks, rawl plugged and the track screwed down, this has done wonders for the railway and when I last ran the mamod it didn't de-rail! About a first, that limited edition paintwork is now spared, do not fear collectors!

I don't currently have a photo of the completed line but here summer visiting Lumber Jack grazes the rails on freshly laid track.