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The Kettle Valley Railway – Bruce Division is a coal and lumber garden railroad modeled after the Kettle Valley Railway that at one time carried freight and passengers through the Thomson/Okanagan Region of British Columbia. The garden railway was started in 2004 and covers a triangular-shaped hillside on Brian Swanton’s property. The railroad features two […]
Meet Rich Perrelli How did you get started in the hobby? I guess it was in my blood. My grandfather was a steam locomotive mechanic, and my dad encouraged my love of trains when I was a little tyke. On warm summer evenings he would drive us to a place where the highway palled the […]
Model paved brick streets: As on most of our garden railways, trains run by a model town. Mine is based on a small midwestern town I visited every summer as a boy. I hung out on Main Street lined with shops in an array of Victorian buildings with a brick paved street. In those days, […]
View from a boxcar door Name: Ray Wheeler Railroad Name: Jericho & Mt. Zion Railway Location: Lynnwood, WA Scale: G scale Theme: Tourist railroad with freight operations in the modern era Description: “From A Boxcar Door” – Safety Film – Riding in an open boxcar on a J&MtZ extra freight train. (An unsafe practice!) Music […]
Small yard garden railway: My wife wanted a big flower garden, and she had bought me a Bachmann Big Haulers Christmas train. How could she not have seen this coming? We live in a mobile home park in West Virginia and have a very small yard, but that didn’t stop us from building a railway. […]
Midday Modeler — 05.25.2022 — This week is Model Railroader’s first live streamed “fun run” around the MR&T model train layout. MR&T officially stands for Milwaukee, Racine & Troy — a fictitious railroad based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Unofficially, the letters represent Model Railroader and Trains — for the two original magazines that formed the core of Kalmbach Media’s early […]
Recreate a prototype photo: If you are a history nut like me, authenticity is important on your layout. I model the Kansas Central narrow gauge line that tried to build across Kansas in the 1870s to connect with the Denver & Rio Grande in Colorado. It met with competition from the standard gauge Kansas Pacific […]
An afternoon passenger train run on the Jericho & Mt. Zion Railway Name: Ray Wheeler Railroad Name: Jericho & Mt. Zion Railway Location: Lynnwood, WA Scale: G scale Theme: Tourist railroad with freight operations in the modern era Description: J&MtZ 4-6-0 #17 makes the run with the afternoon passenger train. Music from Epidemic Sound, “Waiting […]
Q: In a recent Garden Railways e-mail there were 1:24 and 1:25 scale rules pictured. Are these available and from whom? –tinksdaddy, via email A: Scale rules for garden railways: Ten years ago, there were many manufacturers offering scale rulers – frequently referred to as rules – in a variety of the larger scales. […]
Q: I am getting ready to start building a boat kit that is made with wood. I seem to remember reading years ago that I should use “yellow” wood glue, rather than white glue, as the white glue might eventually warp the wood. Does it make any difference whether I use yellow or white glue? […]
I thought it would be fun to make a citrus train for the garden railroad. I like to reuse broken hobby items from my junk box, and I had several pieces to build my train inexpensively. Certain livestock trains had a car — usually a converted long caboose — called a drover’s caboose for the drovers (cowboys) to […]
Common name: Rainbow bush, variegated elephant bush Botanical name: Portulacaria afra f. variegata Plant type: Perennial Plant size: 4′ high x 4′ wide (easily kept much lower) USDA Hardiness Zones: 10-11 (protected in other zones) Cultural needs: Gravelly, well drained, neutral, or slightly acidic soil; full sun The elephants and deer-like kudu of South Africa […]
