History

I always wanted to have my own model railroad. When I was twelve I remember my older brother building an HO scale shelf layout in the back room of our old house. It wasn't big but it had a lot of detail in it. I helped with the construction and ran trains on it.

Not too long after that I got started with N scale thinking I might build a layout in the garage. N scale would allow me to build something bigger in the limited space I was thinking of.

Time passed and I never did get to build that layout. Between school, work and other activities the railroad just never got started but I kept the track and trains I had collected just in case...

Fast forward to the spring of 1993, my wife Kathryn and I had bought a house four months before and were trying to figure out what to do with a backyard of basically dirt.
 

I still thought of building a layout but the rooms in the house weren't very big. I mentioned this to Eric Selna, a friend of mine. He said "Why don't you build a railroad outside?".  "Outside? How?" Eric told me about Garden Railroads and how LGB trains could be run outside. He  also showed me some of his own LGB collection which is quite nice.

I did some research and found out the National Garden Railroad convention was in Santa Clara about 3 miles from my new house that summer. Talk about being in the right place at the right time!

The convention was great, saw a lot of garden railroads for inspiration and joined the local garden railroad club, The BAGRS (Bay Area Garden Railroad Society). We had decided a garden railroad would be really nice. I was never one for plants and flowers but this would give me some incentive to keep the weeds pulled and the backyard looking good.

I was finally going to have my layout. Only one I never imagined.

Conception

• There was definitely going to be a big grass lawn area. We knew that children were going to be in our future and we wanted a backyard with grass for them to play on. Both of us also liked the idea of having a lawn just for the space. So the railroad was not going to be one of those all encompassing backyard layouts.
• Design the railroad with operations in mind so it wouldn't be trains just running through the garden. I planned to have at least three stops on the railroad. The stops of Planter Flats, Grass Valley and the Shadow Mountain Mine.
• I wanted it to  have a mainline run as long as possible so the train wasn't getting into one stop just has it left another. Plus I wanted some idea of distance.
• At least one town with some buildings in it for "town like" scenes. At that time it was Planter Flats.
• The theme was going to be a small Freelance Colorado narrow gauge line styled on the Denver & Rio Grande and the Colorado & Southern in the late 1920's to early 1930's.
• We wanted a pond with some type of running water stream or short water fall.
• I also wanted to try and set up scenes in areas. So as you look around the railroad you would see different little vignettes of life around a railroad of that time. As if you could take your camera out and snap a picture of what was just happening in front of you.

Design

When I first started the design the main town was going to be Planter Flats. The biggest station, main engine facilities and one or two track yard  would be here. The reason for this was when you came out of patio door into the backyard you would get a good look at the town and see a main part of the line from the patio where all the table and chairs are.

To the east would be the Shadow Mountain Mines. I wanted a area that was styled after the mine and station in Ophir, Colorado. One siding in front of the mine and station. Coal and Silver would come from here.

To the west would be some type of logging area just past the pond and into a flat grassy area later know as "Grass Valley". The track would continue under a bridge or two then upgrade to complete the circle loop at the Shadow Mountain Mines. Maybe with a spiral...

At first I was thinking of a loop design with some overlaps or a very elongated double figure eight.

Everything looked good except for the climb from the bridges at grass valley to the Shadow Mountain Mines. As a standard loop it was too steep and their really wasn't room for a spiral. Even if there was room I didn't want to bury track I couldn't get at easily.

So I was stuck. Then I started to look at the open area on the other side of the shed. If I could get over there I could make a turn without a problem. I was was also looking at track design books at thought a loop to loop layout would fit in with my operations goal. So I decided a tunnel through the shed to get to the other side was the way to go. This also gave me a place to store trains and put them directly on the track.

So this decision made the layout a point to point with the new town of Dean set in the middle of the western return loop and the Shadow Mountain mine being the other return loop to allow for continuous running. Once I figured out the electronics were possible for automation of the reverse loops I went ahead.

The loop to loop and the new town added what I think is an extra dimension to the original plans.
Trains now go to somewhere and return along the same track just like the real ones!

With the new plan, to the west would be the farm town of Dean. It would be small with a siding for farm goods since Dean was located next to the vegetable garden around the other side of the house. The far mulberry tree was in the center of town and the track was going to loop around it.

This was the plan used for the initial layout except for the logging spur near the patio which never got built.

Ongoing Changes
Dean becomes a boom town!

During a BAGRS open house to Charlie Allen's Coldwater Creek Garden Railroad my wife Kathryn really liked the main town with it's buildings and church and wanted something like that on our railroad. We really didn't have the room for that kind of a town in either Planter Flats or Dean as the railroad was then.

Planter Flats because of it's location in a Planter box simply had no room for expansion but Dean had room to the west into what was supposed to be a vegetable garden area if we wanted to add more of a town....

Kathryn said the garden wasn't that important and in the past was really too big anyway so we decided on a town expansion and a new patio area for viewing on that side of the house.

Ideas for the Dean Expansion:

• Dean would be the new "Big Town" on the layout and the center of any operations run on the OPRR.
• The town itself would have a main street with a church at the end of town on a small hill.
• The main engine facilities would now be at Dean instead of Planter Flats.
• This one was important. I wanted the entrance to Dean to have a "Chama Like" look to it. When you came down the mainline into town I wanted a dual spout water tower, coal tower and sand house to split the engine facilities from the town and station tracks.
• The old location of the town would be some type of smelter or sampling mill industrial area.

After a lot of playing around with CadRail and in the new space I came up with this plan.

This plan has the important Chama like yard throat and all the other ideas we wanted in this town. I think I came out pretty well. Now all I have to do is fill in the area with buildings and people.
 

Changes to Planter Flats.
Experience and more reading makes for a better layout.

The general look of Planter Flats never looked right to me. Too many tracks in parallel and those tracks in parallel with the planter box sides. At first I couldn't put my finger on it but I knew it wasn't right.

Running trains that first year also showed a problem with uncoupling Kadee couplers at the top of the yard tree in planter flats. The curve was too tight (LGB 1500 2.5' radius) and there wasn't enough straight track to get the couplers lined up right. Especially a car on the front of an engine with a snowplow.

It was around this time I found a great book for anyone interested in Colorado Narrow gauge.

The book is "Up Clear Creek On The Narrow Gauge - Modeling the Colorado Southern" by Harry Brunk. Those of you familiar with the Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette know all about Harry.

Harry Brunk has been writing a long series of articles on the design and building of his UC&N H.O. scale layout which modeled the Clear Creek district of the C&S. The book is a collection of the first 54 Articles which span everything from Depots to Cabooses.

While I'm not building a layout in HO I am doing a Colorado Narrow gauge style so gauge doesn't matter! I've run across so many people in the garden railroading hobby who only read Garden Railways or Finescale Railroader. There is so much more out there and this book is a prime example. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in trains.

Back to our story....

After reading the book and studying the track layout patterns I decided that my Planter Flat track layout was just wrong. Wrong for good operations and looked wrong as far as style for a C&S type layout. The track just didn't "flow" very well.

After playing around with various possible plans in CadRail I finally came up with this plan.

First off, there was too much space between the station track and the mainline. Squeezing these tracks together allowed the station house to come forward and place a "town track" behind the station that can use to back loading area of the station. It also lets in more track without looking cluttered.

Next, the mainline curve behind the turn table was moved out front which allows it's radius to grow. The second siding was blended into this new curve making it longer and easier to do uncoupling operations due to the larger radius. The branch track off this siding also got longer because now it's on an angle in the planter box which also makes more room on either side of the branch track.

I'm really happy with the new layout and there are now plans for planter flats to have a new mine shaft, warehouse and stock pen. All these ideas and the new track plan came from the Clear Creek book.

If I Had To Do It All Over Again...
More Experience.

There is a universal truth for model railroading that says there is at least one thing you do differently if you could...

So here is my list.

• To me, the layout looks flat. Just not enough elevation. Their are a couple of reasons for this:
• The layout is based at ground level. I would build up a box base of at least one foot high, more likely two feet high. That would have taken a long time and yards of dirt but the railroad would have more dimension to it.
• Because I wanted to keep grades under the 4 percent the distances between locations isn't long enough to gain more height without some kind of spiral. Given this I probably would have worked on the plans more to try and fit in a mountain spiral probably over where planter flats is now and move Planter flats off to one side of that. (Big guess on my part...)
• Maybe no reverse loops. While they fit the notion of a train going out and coming back the same way it came it is somewhat of a pain if the trains, circuits, and switch motors aren't all working right.  The DCC control will help this because it doesn't care about polarity for direction but unless you really know electronics or want to dig in and understand this it would be better to stay away from reverse loops.

It would have been better if I could have found some way to connect the Shadow mountain mine with Dean via some hidden track that completes a loop. Not sure if that is even possible on this layout.
 
• Bigger waterfall & stream at the pond area. I wanted to make a more dramatic waterfall but I think space constraints in that corner limited this. Next time I'll try to use a bigger area and plan better.

That's about it for design.  Overall for a first time I pretty pleased with the layout and can't wait to start running operations with 2-4 other people moving goods about backyard. Stay tuned for an "Operations"
section...