Yes, but your Corten was made in Arizona I think…
Cliff I like the idea of a low maintenance bridge and being able to whipper-snip around the base. I’ve been surprised how much the sun affected the woods shingles on my buildings.
As usual, you’ve taught me something new. I thought that a country that successfully replaced wooden studs with steel for house construction would at least be producing this steel under license. Apologies, Cliff! I should have used the correct term, weathering steel.
It turns out that weathering steel has been around since the 1930s and gained architectural popularity in the 1950s. COR-TEN is the trademarked name from U.S. Steel, derived from its two primary properties: corrosion resistance and tensile strength. While “COR-TEN” refers specifically to this U.S. Steel product, over time, the name has become synonymous with weathering steel in general. Other manufacturers have produced similar materials under different names, leading to the generic use of “Corten” (without the hyphen). This phenomenon is similar to how “Coke” in the Southern U.S. refers to any cola or soft drink, just as “Band-Aid” and “Kleenex” have become generic terms for adhesive bandages and tissues, respectively.
And yes, you are correct—we do import COR-TEN! Australia produces a version of corten known as REDCOR. I’m not sure what type of corten I have.
But I’d love those metal bridges.
The one thing from Arizona that we are very proud to own is Ayres Rock. Apparently digging it up caused a bit of erosion leaving Arizona with quite a grand canyon.
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Bill, love your Ayer’s / GC joke, haahhaaa! I wanna see the starship-crane that hauled that sucker!
Thanks for the information on the Corten, makes perfect sense. A lot more sense than shipping megatons of steel from the other side of the planet, just because of a weathering recipe!
Speaking of bridges and maintenance, here’s a few more thoughts.
I totally agree with Sean that once you set up the jig, you mass produce them. I’ll be doing that soon. And for a bridge on a budget, you can’t beat it. And for maintenance, you could lay a nice path of pavers to mow up to. And if you lay them well, with a slightly forgiving / shimmable base of some sort, you could use the same bent all the way over. And sure, there’s precedent for double-track. Not much, but enough to proceed with your hobby intentions!
Also, depending on the era, you might consider a simple girder / beam approach. You can use an aluminum channel, with the legs pointed up or down, depending on the style you wish to portray. Along the length you can adhere cosmetic angles, gussets, flanges, etc.; and even go nuts with rivets. Jerry B (naptowneng) did a great job with that on his lengthy span. Need to hunt up a photo…
Point being, minimal expense, two abutments and a single pier (or two), lightweight enough to take out and work on (say, if the rivet itch gets to you), and cheap enough to replace with something else down the road if that strikes your fancy.
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Agreed! I’m having trouble keeping up! Looks fantastic so far.
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should I be looking at volume 1 as well?
Can’t hurt unless you can not find it
Found it. Here is volume 
Can’t find volume 2 for US prices… yet.
That’s the one I use 
Clearly I was having posting withdrawal symptoms, so today a friend and I moved one more tonne of soil. It will probably get moved 3 more times before finalising the garden.
Getting an exact 3% grade has been my nemesis this week.
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Apologies, for the delay in updating the post, but there has been some movement on the railway. I took that advice to slow down and started to use the time to try to locate quality umlauts, but because life sometimes gets in the way, the railroad had to be put on the back-burner this year. As a result, I completely forgot that I had placed an order with Umlauts-R-Us —until this week, when the parcel finally arrived!
I must admit that the people at Kormsen Branchen Unbegrenzt, the parent company of Umlauts-R-Us, the world’s foremost supplier of precision-engineered umlauts, had warned me at the outset that delivery might take “some time.” This is not due to scarcity—umlauts are plentiful in their native habitats—but because these particular umlauts are guaranteed to function in countries that do not normally use umlauts. This is a feature that requires extensive certification, acclimatisation, and cultural sensitivity training, making Umlauts-R-Us, the only reliable place to source quality grade umlauts.
As you can see on the package, the shipment departed the factory in Chaco Paraguayo under full documentation, including customs declarations describing the contents as:
- Diacritics, mood-enhancing, double-dot-export grade.
Considering the factory reportedly being on the northern side of the Tropic of Capricorn and 300km away from the closest post office, there was extensive tracking accompanying it.
Almost immediately, the box of umlauts was flagged for inspection in transit. Several postal authorities could not determine whether the contents were punctuation, spare parts, or “small expressive eyes,” so they generally routed or re-routed the package onward for examination and clarification.
- In one country, the umlauts were held for three weeks while officials attempted to pronounce them.
- In another, they were stamped RETURN TO SENDER and then immediately stamped FORWARD ANYWAY when nobody could agree where the sender was actually located on a map.
- Reportedly it was even temporarily lost at sea during a short naval battle in the High Sierras, before reappearing at a CVRR depot in Pennsyltucky.
- At least once, the parcel appears to have been redirected simply because a clerk liked the look of it and wanted to add their stamp.
By the time the umlauts arrived, the box bore the markings of a well-travelled package; redirection stamps in multiple languages, dates that made no chronological sense, and a faint smell of international bureaucracy. Inside, however, the umlauts were immaculate—two crisp dots per unit, perfectly aligned, and humming quietly with suppressed linguistic enthusiasm.
As promised by Umlauts-R-Us, the umlauts appear to work exactly as intended—slightly exotic, faintly superior, and entirely unnecessary, which is of course the point, as they appear to be performing flawlessly in a country that has no historical use for them whatsoever. They definitely deserve 
.
So please prepare to for more umlaut enriched Down Under Railway updates…
…but at a slower pace, so the words can be savoured, giving me some time to re-lay the ROW in the January summer sun 
.
And here is a little something to look forward to…
DÜRR
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Dear Mr./Missis/Miz/Divers
Dürr,
May we remind you of the smallprint:
the package was sent and paid FOB Asuncion.
(meaning, that pör locäl customs the rest of the tränsport from and to the different tränsport säctions vill be billed to your pörsonäl päi-päl äccount)
In the hope, to häve found änother sätisfiäd customär,
Grädel König
(public riläitions)
That was hilarious, Bill! Keep up the good work, and I’m looking forward to your layout activities!
After a year of unexpected interruptions, the garden railway endured a prolonged period of unintentional neglect. During that time, a substantial section of garden edging worked loose. The affected area was approximately 400 litres (14 cubic feet) short of soil, and the edging—only shallowly set on a 3%-grade right-of-way—shifted out of position as the soil settled.
Sigh…
I was hoping that I would be able to find this American ACE Hardware edging here as it would have been much easier to lay and maintain.
So this is the section currently being relaid. The arrows show other places where the ROW has narrowed and the edging has lifted.
In this section from the kneeler (pictured) clockwise, only one side of the edging needs to be relaid. The opposite run of garden edging is being used as a reference for levelling purposes, while the soil is carefully tamped to hold everything in place.
I’m using wooden spacers to maintain some uniformity to the ROW.
It’s been surprisingly difficult to trench the soil to replace the edging. I’ve been able to work 2 meter sections at a time.
Here is one section where the succulents did not die out. Luckily they seem hardy on transplantation.
The technique I’m using involves soaking the sandy loam in a bucket and letting it flow into the trench with the levelled, staked and spaced garden edging in place. It is kind of like making sand castles.
Then using stomp action (similar to GHA Bruce @Deneh) to ensure both sides of the edging stays in place.
As I transition from 3%grade to the flat (in the cut) I run into difficulties again.
The ROW in the cut had narrowed and most of the mini-mondo grass had died, so the process became even more of a pain.
So I had to play around with the watering system as well. But as of today I’m now on the flat section.
The last two photos are from inside the house, as the temperature has hit 43°, so hot that folks near us went out and fried an egg on the sidewalk.
Hopefully Herself & I will be able get some morning time in on the DÜRR in between interruptions as 2026 looks like more of the same. Update as time permits…
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ahhhh…
now i understand.
it was not, that you were inactive, but you were occupied by watching your soil settling…
a hard job, only second to watching paint dry.
maybe, your edgeing does raise, because you didn’t weight it down with enough umlauts?
Sorry to hear about the rebuild work Bill. Nature just has a way of messing with our plans. Hope the new roadbed stays in place.
Cheers
N
PS, Thanks for the heatwave, we get your cast off air tomorrow thru Sunday. Only tapping low 30’s but that’s off the scale for us sitting in the middle of an ocean.
Bill, I’ve used that material a lot, and it’s certainly not a panacea. I think you’re probably on the right track as-is. But… remind me what specific material you’re using?
Yeah, Korm.
After this year’s PITA (see Part 1), I completely understand why you chose to build your railway indoors.
As for the umlauts: while I’ve found the Ü works reasonably well for track spacing, the gap between the two dots is wide enough to let the garden edging lift and misbehave. In hindsight, I suspect I should have invested in kahakōs (macrons). I should confirm this with Eric but it seems like a fully covered Ū would offer far superior containment and edging stability in the warmer climate we deal with here.
I’m not getting rid of my umlauts, but I am starting to think that Ü is best suited to indoor railways, where it can’t let things escape through the dots.
DŪRR
Neil,
Sorry for the short notice on the heatwave. Having lived in the arid zone—where dropping below 40 °C was a perfectly good excuse to go for a walk—I’ve clearly overcorrected after moving to the temperate zone. I now agree that 30 °C is more than sufficient justification to retreat straight into the air-conditioning.
Ironically, we thought a raised garden bed was a sensible idea when we started the project. I assumed we’d just be bending over it occasionally—not climbing up and down, up and down.
Cliff,
The edging is 15 × 3.2 mm PETG: smooth on one side, pebbled on the other. It’s stiff enough that it doesn’t like bending in the heat, but it does have a tendency to buckle slightly. Steel would have been the obvious solution, but it was prohibitively expensive.