There are Trains at the Bottom of his Garden

TCS member Fred van der Lubbe clearly gets lots of pleasure from his garden. In his words “My track is used a lot for Gauge 1 and Gauge 0, running clockwork, steam and electric trains.

A selection of the running can be seen on my YouTube channel SNCF231E .. Fred also has his own website sncf231e.nl with both his videos and e-books.

Fred has recently written an article for the Train Collector magazine (see the June 2017 issue) on French toy train streamliners. As well as the article Fred has also provided a great set of videos mainly shot on his garden layout featuring many of the trains mentioned, for our enjoyment. You will find them all here with some brief notes.

And here are some of his other recent videos for your enjoyment (updated 6 August 2017):

Fred also writes:

I have some older tinplate 3-rail electric Gauge 1 locomotives which I tried to run using one of the 0 gauge rails as centre rail by fiddling with the pick-ups of these locomotives. This did not really go well. I also do have some S gauge (22.5 mm between the tracks) trains, most of it American Flyer, and then the idea came to kill 2 birds with one stone by adding a middle rail to my outer loop positioned such that S Gauge and Gauge 1 3-rail electric could be run (not at the same time, of course). I ordered  at Tenmille 30 meter of nickel silver bullhead rail and some 1200 chairs.

While waiting for the order to arrive I started to test a bit with small pieces of rail and sleepers and some leftover chairs. This resulted in making a drill jig. I looked at the NEM and NMRA standards and since I do not use any switches I just kept the gauge to (approximately) 22.5 mm. During the construction I checked with an American Flyer bogie whether the gauge was right and when the track was finished I pushed some cars around to further check. I found that BUB Spur S did not fit. I looked around the internet and found somewhere a German forum post mentioning that BUB Spur S is 24 mm since BUB made an error when translating from Inches. So S Gauge and Spur S are not compatible to my surprise. But I can run 3-rail electric and Gauge S as can be seen in some of the videos above.

A photo by Fred showing the multi gauge rails.