Stew's Garden Scale Railroad Empire

Our Model Railroad Empire

I'm having too much fun with this... (When I can have fun with this)

Our latest garden scale additions have been to our new old house - a two bedroom, one bath bungalow in Mount Dora. It was built circa 1925, at least, we're pretty sure it was. The records say it was built in 1925, but there was this fire, a fire that destroyed all of the records previous to 1925. But I digress...

A Bit Of History...

Our garden scale "empire" started on the pool deck of our house in Wekiva back in 2013. Inspired by our anniversary trip to the Cass Scenic Railway, Ann bought me a garden scale Bachmann Shay engine for Christmas, but she let me open it early.

Ann had found a train set advertised in a local "trader" type publication for $50. It was a Bachmann B&O passenger set with the engine, tender, two passenger cars, a bunch of track and the power pack. I say local, but it was all the way on the other side of Orlando from us, probably a 45 minute drive one way. At first I didn't really want to go - I didn't know much about it being an HO scale modeler at the time, and I really wouldn't know what to look for or whether $50 was a good deal or not. But what the heck, why not? It's only $50!

We got there and the folks showed us a couple of bins, one with the set, and another with a bunch more track and switches and other specialty pieces. We could buy the set alone for $50 or the get all of it for a lot more. More than I was willing to pay for a bunch of track and stuff before I really knew what is was worth or whether we would even like it or not. The steam engine was missing the popoff valve on the steam dome and one of the piston rods was broken, but everything looked to be in good shape, so we said why not. We're now the proud owners of well used garden scale train set!

So when we got home we laid it all out on the patio to see just what we had to work with. We set up the loop of indoor track that it came with to make sure it worked, and sure enough it did. I'm glad we didn't buy all that extra track, since it would have been useless outdoors in the weather for any length of time. That's good enough to show that it works, but now I know I need more track, and a place to expand the layout.

It soon expanded into the side yard, complete with a "wye", a long passing siding, and a water feature.