Summer of 1998 - A Not-So-Ill Wind - A month or two after I put the temporary track in the side yard, winds blew down two trees on our property about thirty feet away. They were also near the edge of the property. They had been bushy, and that area had been so overgrown, that it had been useless for anything. Clearing the mess away took weeks. But once it was gone, counting the place I had the temporary loop, there was a 60' by 12' open area of the yard we'd never used for anything else just waiting to be turned into something.
In the meantime, the city of Springfield, Ohio was tearing up its old Main Street to replace sewer lines. They ripping out old paving stones and trolley ties as they went. After asking permission to haul the stuff away, I soon had a stack of supplies in the yard. We had also accumulated a nice stack of limestone rocks and boulders from various places around the yard where previous owners had build sheds or laid flower beds.
I decided to start construction near the southern end of the open space. There, the land dropped several inches as it approached the fenceline. So to raise the railroad an average of eighteen inches from the ground, I would need to add about 12" of height in the "front" (toward the center of the yard) and about 24" in the back (toward the fence). Rock gardening is a family tradition, so I decided to use the old railroad ties in the "back" and build a terraced "rock garden" in the front. But first, the pond had to go into the ground.
In the meantime, Shelia had seen a pond in Michigan that she thought was very attractive, surrounded by hostas. I didn't really want hostas next to my trains, but we determined a row of hostas just back from the pond would meet both of our expectations.
Starting with a Hole in the Ground - I laid the ties about where I thought they should go, leaving plenty of access between the ties and the fenceline. Then I positioned the pond liner a few feet inside the tie row, imagining that I would eventually have a loop of track around the pond. I left several feet between the pond and the south end of the raised garden. I needed room for Shelia's hostas, and also expected to build a tunnel later.
Digging next to the stump of a dead tree was interesting. The pond liner I had bought (a 100-gallon Marcourt "Jamaica") had a "bump out" on the bottom. Since I was going to be building up the land around the pond anyway, I decided to just dig a hole large enough to accommodate the "bump out," and leave the rest more ore less sitting at "ground level," before backfill. In retrospect, raising the pond was good because it slightly reduces the number of leaves that blow in and it eliminates the chances that herbicides from my lawn will kill my fish and plants. But it was bad because it changed the viewing angle. A person standing back from the pond (as one must from my railroad) barely sees the water lilies, much less the fish. Again, with a larger pond, and more surface area, this wouldn't have been so much of a problem.
That said, I probably couldn't have sunk the whole pond into the ground without a backhoe. As it was I had to chop and saw many large roots to get the "bump" underground. In the meantime I bought a couple trash-can's worth of sand at a gravel pit, and used that to backfill in the hole once the liner was in place. The only problem with this is that, no matter how hard you try, you'll never get the entire cavity filled, which makes voles and chipmunks very happy and consequently disruptive. After about four years, I think the ground finally settled enough to remove their neat little caves, as those vermin have been less of a problem of late.
Then came the real backfill.
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