Stan & Sophie Archie
Proprietors of the Dismal Creek Railroad
We are Sophie (the Conductor) and Stan (the Engineer) Archie and we have a train garden in NE North Carolina. And please do not call him Stan, just Archie is fine. While many “Train People” model a specific railroad and/or era and strive for realism in their trains and layout, that’s not us. We have a garden with a train layout as a feature within it and we lean more to the whimsical. We’d much prefer to have some trains running round and round on the layout, sitting back in the glider under the pear tree and enjoying the view. There is no right or wrong way to enjoy your trains, I am in absolute awe of some folks modeling skills, what matters is that you get out and run trains.
We are members of the Tidewater Big Train Operators club and enjoy going to the monthly memberships meetings and (in non-Apocalyptic years) our club does two shows yearly at a local garden center, we have a layout at one or two major train shows at one of the conventions centers and the club puts on an annual Holiday Train Show at Christmas-time that runs for a week and fills a gymnasium.
We live in a 100+ year old farmhouse with two cats and we also collect old kerosene lamps and vintage kitchen tools. But this website isn’t about any of that.
Our train garden is 65 feet by 35 feet with a pond and water feature at one end. We currently have about 550 feet of brass track and we run track power with DC control exclusively. There are three completely separate loops of track. The inner one is 125 feet of winding track using five foot diameter curves. This is for our smallest trains as larger ones don’t care for such tight radius. Outside that is another 148 foot loop of somewhat less windy track that utilizes eight foot curves. Pretty much everything we have is at least capable of running on this track, though the longer locomotives and cars can sometimes look a bit odd as they are going to have a lot of overhang on the insides of the curves. In the midst of this is our trolley track that is really windy with four foot diameter track. One or two car trolleys run back and forth on this just fine. At the perimeter is a 238 foot loop of track with 16 foot curves. This is normally reserved for our higher speed trains and/or ones with longer cars.
Dismal Creek Railroad 