Making a start

The hardest thing about starting any project, particularly a big one, is taking the first step.  We bought the land for Whistlestop about 20 years ago, which was a fantastic start!  At the time though, we didn't really know what we were going to use it for, other than the fact that I felt it was suitable for my hoped-for museum, or at least it would make a good weekender.  When we bought it the property wasn't exactly prime real-estate.  It had been used for grazing sheep and cattle over the years, but a previous owner had made a very misguided attempt to improve it's grazing capacity by knocking over many of the mature gum-trees (eucalypts), which then allowed a lot of scrubby native tea-tree bushes to spring up and take over.  The picture below gives some idea of what we started with, but even this area is a lot more clear in the photo than when we bought the block.

Over the years we have gotten to know the property better. Many exploratory walks hacking through the scrub, getting scratched to pieces, gave me a much better idea of what I had to work with.  Some tracks have been cleared, although there is much, much more to do.  A site has been selected and cleared for our house, the building of which will commence early next year.  Somewhat more importantly for me though (I hope my wife doesn't read this!) I have mapped out the approximate course of what hopefully will be a very interesting route for the miniature steam railway that I plan to build (more about that later), and the site for the Toy Train Museum building, which I call the Trainbarn.  In Australia we don't have barns, we have sheds, but since this building is going to display American trains, I thought it should at least have an American-sounding name.

Although most of the planning has been done by walking around the property, I have found the Google Earth site to be extremely useful too.  The 'picture' of our block is reasonably current, and quite good resolution, so it's enabled me to get a much better overall perspective of the place.  I use the Ruler function to draw things like railway lines and buildings in their approximate positions- not what it's really intended for, but useful nevertheless.

After selecting the site for the Trainbarn, I have spent a lot of time clearing it ready for building, although there is still plenty to do.  As I do the clearing, new ideas come to mind- ideas that I totally hadn't thought about before starting the work.  That's how I like to do things, letting plans evolve as things progress.  But it's necessary to make a start first.

We need to provide parking space for guests to the museum, and as I cleared away more of the tea-tree scrub adjacent to the main track I 'discovered' a couple of good-sized gumtrees which I wanted to keep.  I love the Aussie bush, and gumtrees in particular, and I want the overall feeling of our place to be like a country park, with as many big trees and as much native bushland as possible, so I make every attempt to keep the existing trees, and have also planted many new ones.  Having found these trees I realised that there was just the right sized space between them and the main track for a small carpark, and space to build a native garden underneath them.  The photo below shows our car in the carpark, checking it for size, before we surfaced it.

I found the space a little tight to do a three point turn, so I widened it by a couple of feet to the left of the photo.  I then got a bobcat in to surface the carpark with deco- Decomposed Granite- which is a great hard surface that also allows rain to soak through for the tree roots.  I'll talk more about spreading the deco in another post, but suffice to say, I think those bobcat operators are amazing! Here's a photo of the just-completed carpark.

The next step is to get the required approvals for the Museum in general, and the construction of the Trainbarn building in particular, but I'm really happy with the progress so far.  A good start has been made!!

Interestingly, at the rear of the carpark in this photo, just beyond the big rock, you can just make out some white markers in the ground.   I am using these to mark out the route of the miniature railway line.  There will be a level crossing across the track, and a small station just to the right.

In the next post I'll talk more about the plans for the interior of the Trainbarn, and some details of the three main layouts that will be on display.