The Toenail ridge garden railway

There can't be many people who can say honestly that they bought a house on the basis of its suitability for a garden railway.
We did.
I became interested in Large-scale a number of years ago, after having built a model kit of the General, and then buying an old Lima O-scale train-set at a garage sale.
The Lima was very European, very modern (ie. no coal or steam bits) and very big compared to the N models I was struggling to see at the time.
I had been experimenting with scratch-built O-scale bodies on HO trucks as a kind of psuedo-narrow-gauge, when it hit me that a 1:24th. model built on O-scale trucks would make a nice decoration.
Subsequently, I made a board-by-board model of a free-lance narrow-gauge box-car, mounted on the frame and trucks of the Lima German 90 ft. goods wagon.
It was an eye-opener to find in this scale that the doors could be made to slide and latch, the brake rigging could be modeled instead of just suggested, and that balsa wood planks looked like real wood planks, complete with scale grain and paint absorption.
Needless to say (I know I am speaking to the converted!), the N-scale rapidly got sold off and the Large-scale search was on!
One of the early shocks I'm sure we all experience when moving to G from the little stuff is the sheer cost of it in comparison.
I decided very quickly that this foray into G was going to be more a scratch-building procedure than a purchasing one.
Over a few months, therefore, the balsa box-car was joined by half a dozen other pieces of rolling stock and a very second-hand Bachmann radio-controlled 10-wheeler.
The original box-car had MDC G-scale trucks mounted in place of the O-scale Limas, and they all sat proudly on pressed tin track on top of the bookcases.
About this time, a bushfire threatened our house and property and the decision was made to sell the 15 acres and move back into the suburbs.
The fire was the final decider but we were also tired of the upkeep that a large property requires and also the commuting to work was becoming a strain, and of course, I couldn't find a good, reasonably level spot for a railway.
We began the search for a normal house and property in the suburb closest to our work-place and anyone who has run the gambit of the Open House merry-go-round doesn't need me going into any details here about what the next 6 months were like.
Every place we entered, my wife Kathy would head for the kitchen and I would head for the back yard.
Found some lovely kitchens with lousy yards and lovely yards with lousy kitchens and some with lousy everythings.
Eventually, the ideal place came on the market, perfect kitchen and disused, elevated rear garden