Progress in North Carolina!

During this long web silence I have made significant progress on the "North Carolina" section of the railroad, which is to run on the narrow strip of land that I am cultivating in between our driveway and the neighbor's fence. The gate at the end of the driveway is the state line back into Georgia.

The plan has been to cut back the natural slope enough to install a low block wall to produce a flat spot on which to lay track. Here's a photo of what it looked like in 2007 before any work was done.



































And here is an example of the general look we are going for, if you imagine that grassy lane to be a driveway:





















Here is a photo from a May 2010 post, which reveals if nothing else, that I have been working on this for quite a while now. This shows the opening volley - cutting back the embankment. That's the first 25 or so of 85 feet.

An unexpected benefit of this excavation was that the rain water draining out the neighbor's lawn came out of the hillside and ran down the edge of the driveway. Previously it was traveling under the driveway and appearing in the crawl space under the house!





















Phase Two was to rough out the length of the footer, get the basic width and depth in place. For this time we had a bowling alley-style trough to fall into if you parked too close to that edge of the driveway. Here it is in February 2011.






















Phase 3 was to square up the hole and get the depths right for a tiered level wall. I started at the gate end, where the plan has been to build a new wooden gate directly in front of the old hillbilly gate. Here is the view of the deeper hole for a 6" x 6" gatepost, as well as the first few feet of the squaring.


































Right before Christmas 2011 my brother-in-law Efrain came and built the forms for the concrete.
























Concrete at last! February 2011 the footer was poured - 3.5 yards from a truck with a 50 foot conveyor. The operator could have threaded a needle with that conveyor and snaked it right back to the end of the driveway.






































By March the forms are off. Let's lay some block!


































But before the block can be laid I needed to install the gate post. Here it is, as well as the frame of the left half of the gate.