Trains, Trains and More Trains

One of the many projects that I’ve been meaning to do for the longest time has been to build an outdoor/garden railroad with the G-Scale (large scale) trains that I’ve been collecting for a number of years. Now that my parents have moved back to Wisconsin, and subsequently have a big backyard, I finally decided to go forward with this little project.

Early in the ‘excavation’ of the land that I was working with, I discovered that these trains require far more space than I had originally envisioned. If you had the time and money (the money being the bigger of the two), you could easily cover an entire acre backyard with these trains (sounds pretty neat to me.)

First off, I cleared a spot in the backyard that was overrun with weeds, then I layed out bricks as a track bed for this train, from which I will cover in gravel to hide the bricks. Fortunately, I have lots of bricks to work with, since the house ‘came with’ quite a nice supply of loose bricks.

So far the layout is really small, due to the lack of resources at my disposal (money). But, hopefully by next Spring I should be able to expand the layout quite a bit. Also by then, I will hopefully begin planting some vegetation in and around the layout, which will eliminate the wasteland look.

Anyway, here are the pictures of what I have done thus far: (In order from oldest to newest)

To light the tower, I disassembled one of those cheap solar-powered driveway lights ($5 a piece), and used the solar panel, with a rewired LED, to light up the building at night, which turned out incredibly well. There are also four other solar lights bordering around the layout to add a little evening light.