Construction May 2016

One of our first thoughts when we moved in to our house was where to put the train garden? We live in an old farmhouse sans the farm. When the farmland itself was sold off something that went with it was any sort of a back yard. One side of the house is taken up with the driveway and a couple of large pecan trees. The other side yard is pretty expansive, but half of it is where the drain field for our septic system lay. So if we were to have trains the front of the house is was. Fortunately we have a very big front yard.

Once we received our (first) order of track we planned on having an outer loop of about 25′ by 40′. We laid the track down and started running trains.

The first thing Archie said was “not big enough. Make it bigger”. So Sophie made it bigger.

Archie was not impressed. Apparently what he meant was to make the layout itself larger. We we added more straight sections to it and ended with a loop about 35′ by 65 ‘. And it was declared good. Now our ICE train really had some room to run.

After we ordered more track to replace what we had re-allocated to the outer loop we put down the center loop…

…and realized it was going to be very hard to keep the grass mowed.

There are many different ways that people create a garden train layout, just setting the track on the lawn and leaving it at that isn’t actually one of them. At least not long term, we did leave the track like this for a couple weeks while we acclimated our minds to the fact that a significant portion of our new front yard was going to be a train layout.

An elevated layout is popular with the live steam crowd as it allows you to keep the track very level and flat, but you end up with very little scenery or greenery. And the “garden” part of garden trains was as important to us as the trains themselves. Another, and maybe most common, method was to build a raised bed system where the track is elevated and then everything backfilled around it to bring the ground level up to the track. Like the elevated tracks this has the advantage of bringing everything up to a height where you don’t have to get down on the ground as much.

We decided we going to build a ground level layout, for several reasons. One is the fact that at 35′ by 65′ feet you are not going to be able to reach much of the track or garden from the border anyway so you have to get into it. Another factor in our decision is that at over 2200 square feet to raise it all even just a foot would require a LOT of backfill material and topsoil. And that was both an expense we couldn’t really afford and a lot of labor we didn’t care to invest. It would also have added an element of time to the construction and as our railroad was going into the front yard we didn’t want to have it looking like a disaster area for an extended period of time.

There are a few negatives to our approach that we have to live with. One is that a ground level layout may or may not actually be level. Ours is not. Were we live was actually reclaimed from the Great Dismal Swamp many years ago and without adequate drainage it would happily return to be a swamp, so our yard has a very slight slope. It’s not anything we really have to worry about but for other people thinking about this type of layout it could be a concern. And in our yard it looks like there were once at least a few trees. Once we get started the underground remains may be a concern.

White’s Nursery Spring 2016

Our first Spring show at White’s Nursery. Most of our pictures from this show were lost so these are mostly from setting up. As White’s is a nursery and greenhouse we try to incorporate as many different plants into our layouts there as we can, they made their appearance later.

This show was during our K’Nex phase. The coasters and rides look pretty cool when they work but unfortunately they do not hold up well to being moved around and neither of us had the desire or patience to keep putting them back together again. This was a pretty brief phase.

Most train shows are done on a surface that doesn’t do much for your layout, such as a concrete floor, so our train club and us try to do something to disguise it. We’ve used various mediums such as scattering mulch, laying out white sheets (for imitating snow) or in this case burlap (for imitating I don’t know what). It looks marginally better than the bare cement floor but not much and we only tried it a couple times.

New Carolinians

We have moved! We bought a house and are now North Carolinians. Packing up all the “stuff” from the train room at the campground and getting it down to our new house was an experience. And moving the train garden itself was a feat. We picked up all of the track. Emptied and brought down our small water feature. Even dug up a couple junipers we were attached to. And carted it all down to our new place.

For now all of the O gauge, HO and N scale track, trains and scenery will stay packed away. We have a room where we may end up setting up a train layout, but for the time being it is all out of the way.

Our new place is on about 2/3 of an acre and it is all nice and flat. But it has no back yard. Which is where most people we know have their garden train layouts. We have a ginormous front yard plus a substantial side yard. It looks like once we are ready to start on our new garden train layout it is going to be in the front of the house.

White’s Nursery Fall 2015

Our train club does a small show at White’s Nursery and Garden Center every spring and fall. The Fall 2015 show was the first show layout that Archie and I ever did. The show at White’s is a bit different than the ones we put on at train shows in a convention center. Each individual or couple has their own spot at White’s with the freedom to do what ever you want. We set up in what’s called the “Glass House” because it offered a larger spot to work with.

We were still living in the campground at the time so we made little camp sites and even tried to recreate our layout there with a train room and a Z Scale layout mimicking our train garden there.

The fall show is generally Christmasy themed, we had to make do with the decor they had at the nursery and a lot of poinsettias. We always enjoy doing the shows here and try to incorporate as many plants as possible.