The Gravel Works by the Garden Railway

There was a free corner at the edge of the garden railway where nothing much wanted to grow anyway. Exactly the right spot for a building site. I did not have to buy the material: dark soil from the compost heap, a few stones out of the border, and pale grit of the kind that lies on every path around here.

Real material brings its own problems

Soil looks marvellous in a photograph. It has texture, it has colour, and it does what soil does when a wheel loader drives through it. It also has drawbacks nobody mentions beforehand. It is wet. It cakes into the wheel arches, clings to the figures, and refuses to be knocked back out of a bucket. A skid-steer loader carrying a load of earth in front of it has to stand in the sun for a quarter of an hour before I want to pick it up again.

The grit was the second lesson. At garden railway scale it passes convincingly for track ballast, which is fine. It just slides. A heap I have shaped looks flatter ten minutes later, and if a wagon knocks against it, half the embankment ends up on the rails. At some point I stopped fighting it and simply put the wagon where the heap was willing to stay.

Three days, because the light is so short

I started on a Sunday afternoon in November, and by four it was over. In November you get maybe three usable hours here, and the last of them is the best: the light comes in low from the side, the yellow leaves in the background glow, and the machines throw long shadows across the soil. That is why in one of the pictures the green crane with the red grab is already half in shadow while the yellow hopper wagon in front still has light on it. That was not planning, that was the time of day.

Which is why the corner was only finished on the third day. In the last photograph the crane is loading pale grit, the red crocodile locomotive is standing ready, and the sun has essentially gone. A piece of windmill sits in the background, because that is simply where it stands.

The visitor behind the fence

In one picture a Highland cow is looking over the site. It is in the pasture behind the wire fence, head down, grazing, and it took not the slightest interest in the loader in front of it. I would have liked the fence gone — but the animal came close enough at exactly that moment for its coat to fill half the upper frame. You cannot build something like that. You can only have the camera ready.