Category Archives: 5″ Scale

The Middleton Garden Railway

The Middleton Garden Railway is a 5″ scale garden railway in Romford owned by the Middleton family (of Ride On Railways Ltd)

Middleton Garden Railway Footbridge

It includes several impressive features, such as a footbridge, working signals and tunnel/loco storage area.

The line provides a great showcase for Ride On Railways’ products, such as their Trojan, Hercules and Jasper locomotives and rolling stock. Regular open days are held to allow you to get first hand experience before buying, and even have a drive yourself.

Middleton Garden Railway Track Plan

The MGR website is essential reading for anyone even considering building a garden railway, there are many pages showing the evolution of the line, from a simple loop to the pretty complex (for a garden railway) layout you can see above.

Middleton Garden Railway Shed

This really is a fantastic example of an extremely polished garden railway, with what many people would call some very ambitious features. Truely inspiring.

I will update the site again soon with a more in depth look at some of the features of this line.

Pictures used with the kind permission of Ride on Railways.

The Strawberry Line – Avon Valley Country Park

The Strawberry Line is Britain’s only commercial ground level 5″ railway.

It is based at Avon Valley Country Park, near Bristol, and currently has 5 steam locomotives and 12 battery powered locomotives.

Strawberry Line Running

This line is obviously much bigger than your average garden railway, but can still provide some good ideas and inspiration for your own line – I recommend visiting it if you are in the area.

Some of my favourite features of this line are the 60ft long tunnel and working water column for steam locos.

For those who aren’t able to travel on this line themselves, I found a cab view video on Youtube:

[youtube width=”425″ height=”335″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raESzHlRxXQ[/youtube]