Does your garden include engines, rolling stock, turntable pits and switchstands? When you visit a garden center, do you ignore the towering magnolias and mop-head hydrangeas in favor of plants with tiny leaves and miniature flowers?
Those who answer “yes” are part of a growing number of homeowners engaged in garden railroading, a hobby that combines model trains with gardening. Garden railroading has its own magazine, Garden Railways; its own association, the Garden Trains Association; and its own regional and national conventions.
In Atlanta, many garden railroading hobbyists are members of the Georgia Garden Railway Society. Members may simply enjoy model trains and visiting other members’ layouts or they may be so hands-on that they build their own locomotives and engineer their own systems.
One thing they all have in common is an appreciation for this hobby, where the railroad layout is so much more realistic than anything that can be created indoors. No need for plaster mountains or plastic replicas of streams and lakes. These garden railroads feature mountains made of dirt, rivers that are really water and rocks that are truly stones.
Linda and Dex Kimball are members of the Georgia society. The backyard of their home in Roswell’s Willow Springs subdivision features a 900-square-foot railway, complete with pond, waterfall, farm, trolley line and a village with church, shops and homes.
A visit to a model train show in 2004 revived Dex Kimball’s interest in model railroads.
“My father built a beautiful model railroad in the basement of our home in Ohio in the 1940s,” said Kimball.
At the show he saw trains bigger than those in his father’s collection and realized they could be used in a garden setting.
Linda Kimball’s father was a railroad engineer, so she shares her husband’s fondness for trains and their importance in American life.
“And our two grandchildren at the time, Joshua and Jimmy, were also an incentive to create this special garden. We named our line the J & J Railroad after them and the town is Abbyville, named after our newest grandchild, Abegail,” said Linda Kimball.
Their railroad replaced a flat 30-by-30-foot patch of lawn and took three months to install. First to go in was a water feature, a stream and waterfall pouring into a 400-gallon pond. The tracks were laid out next and Linda Kimball began adding the plant material, including dwarf plants to match the scale of the railroad. Larger plants were added to frame views and screen parts of the layout.
Properly scaled buildings with fences, lighting and miniature vehicles completed the picture. The end result is a garden that offers different scenes from different vantage points and allows the trains to disappear and reappear from view, all adding to the magic of this miniature world.
Maintenance of a miniature world is no different than maintaining a larger home and garden. Plants must be pruned to keep them in scale, the track must be kept clear, and buildings and people need a little washing every so often.
Most of the plant material in the Kimballs’ garden is evergreen or perennial, but Linda Kimball does add a few seasonal touches like the violas she’s just planted to give a little lift of color. Her favorite additions have been several miniature Japanese maples, small-leafed ivy that trails off the trestle, and the moss she’s nurtured that makes lovely lawns in the town and a soft ground cover around the pond.
The Kimballs enjoy their garden railroad 365 days a year. The waterfall provides soothing noises and a chiminea allows the couple to sit outside on cool evenings and watch the train run through the lighted landscape.
Their miniature community continues to evolve. A robbery is going on at the bank and a father and son are fishing off the dock at the boathouse. Dex Kimball’s playful addition is a boat that appears to be headed over the waterfall while Linda has staged a wedding at the church.
“Changing things around helps us stay interested and when we have guests, they stand out there with a glass of wine and ask, ‘What have you added since we were here last?’” he said.
“Men never get over wanting to play with their toys,” added Linda Kimball, who had to admit that women like to play with the trains, too.
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