A couple from Essex who spent seven years building a miniature railway in their garden say the project has left their house either unsellable or worth three times its original value. Dave Walker, 54, and his wife Angela, 55, from Clacton, finally completed the 400-metre track last summer after years of construction.
The couple initially flattened their quarter-acre garden to host a marquee for their wedding reception in August 2017. While considering a small garden railway, they decided to go bigger, abandoning plans for a new kitchen. Work began in June 2018, with the first 50-metre oval line completed that September.
The five-figure project features five locomotives, four lines, a tunnel, and track that runs the full length of the garden and across the driveway. Built by hand, the five-inch gauge railway operates on car batteries at 24 volts and includes a wooden workshop, a metal shop styled like a signal shop, and an engine shed. The track itself uses mostly second-hand rails on roofing batten sleepers laid over red granite chippings.
Dave, who works in wedding and events entertainment and is also a DJ, said: "Our house is either now unsellable or worth triple. Most people think we're mental. They must think: 'Are they living the dream or are they mad?' Our kitchen is from 1988 and you don't go to your deathbed thinking, 'God, I loved my kitchen'. You go thinking about how you built that railway in your garden and how fantastic it was."
Dave received his first train set from his grandfather at age five, and two rooms of the home are dedicated to model railways. The garden also contains memorabilia, a full-sized steam engine chimney cast in 1928, and decorations including frogs, gnomes, and dinosaurs. The couple plan to build a river beneath the track and eventually a bridge.
Angela, a former primary school worker, said: "No miniature railway will ever be finished. Our friends and neighbours think we're mad. But when you walk in from the side entrance and the garden reveals itself, that is a magical moment. We didn't want a railway with a few plants here and there, we wanted the garden to be stunning in its own right. But I still haven't got my new kitchen. I've jazzed ours up with stickers over boring beige tiles."
