Birdhouses and Bubble Boy
The decorative wooden birdhouses you can find ‘most anywhere work great on a garden train layout, though the scale is just the tiniest bit too small. They work well on an indoor layout that is, they do not hold up at all outside. Do not ask how we know. We have quite a few of them and they are fun to add things to and make small vignettes.
This was the first time we added some sort of water feature to one of our layouts. For shows like this the layouts are generally fairly small and it is hard to have the trains do anything more than run around in a circle. In other words it gets boring quick. You can either try to add a lot of detail or in our case a bit of animation. The moving water helps provide that.
And then there is Herbie the Hamster and Bubble Boy. Herbie actually runs and spins his exercise wheel and the whale blows bubbles. This layout in particular gave us a good lesson in how quickly a four year old’s hand can reach out to grab something. For the larger layouts our club does we have a rope barrier that keeps (most) people from getting too close to the trains and layouts. That is not the case at White’s Nursery. Our layout is right on the floor.
Dismal Creek Railroad 