Garden Railways on DVD-ROM

Since magazines first started being archived on DVDs it has been my hope that Garden Railways would one day be able to follow suit. I’m delighted to announce that this is coming to pass, and that the first 32 years of GR, plus a bunch of extras, will be available soon.

We have been working on this top-secret project for nearly a year. Putting decades of a magazine into DVD format is no small task. While it’s true that our issues in recent years have been produced in digital format as well as print, all of those in preceding years were not. For those years, each and every page had to be scanned—a total of 12,808 for the magazine alone. Those pages, combined with the more recent digital pages we already had on hand, brought the total number of Garden Railways pages to a whopping 19,104.

Every page of every issue is included in the DVD, which means advertising pages as well as editorial. The pages will be reproduced at very high resolution, so each page or photograph can be enlarged on your screen without losing clarity.

Note: Click on any of the images in this article to enlarge.

The entire DVD will be searchable by author, title, subject matter, or key words. For this to happen, I had to go through every issue, back to volume 1, number 1, and index every story and column into a massive database that forms the nucleus of the powerful search engine attached to the DVD.

But wait—there’s more! I wanted to make our DVD even more complete and useful. To be really complete, I felt that it should include all nine issues of the Sidestreet Banner, which was my company publication that immediately preceded Garden Railways. These encompass an additional 60 pages, and the Banners have been included in the same search engine, to boot.

But wait—there’s even more!! For nearly 20 years Ted Stinson provided plans for GR, both in pull-out form and, later, as downloadable digital files. In total he provided 111 plans in various garden scales, for a variety of different items, including rolling stock, locomotives, trackside structures, and even a few boats. While some of these plans are still available in print form, many have been out of print for years, so this DVD will be the only place that all of Ted’s plans will be available in a single package. Also on the DVD will be the plans that followed Ted’s on our website, including reprinted plans from Model Railroader magazine and a few structure plans drawn by Steve Terry. Every one of these plans will be in PDF format so that you can print them out on your home computer. They can be printed full size as published or you can resize them to whatever scale you please.

We at Garden Railways are excited about seeing this project come to fruition, and we hope that you will be, too.

You can order the DVD from our online store at kalmbachhobbystore.com (inventory #15118). You can also call 800-533-6644.

Have a question? Production Editor Rene Schweitzer is answering questions about the product in our forum.