The Little Railroad That Grew: First National Open House

First National Open House

Written by Paul Race for Family Garden Trains

April and May, 2002: Open House Preparation - Once I got the mess cleared up, finishing the elevated loop was my first priority. I did everything the experts say, and measured as carefully as I could, but I still couldn't get things to go exactly right, and time was running out. Finally, in a burst of perspiration, I went to the hardware shop and bought several of the kind of "plates" they use to nail joists together. I laid the horizontal 2x6 pieces (stringers) on the fenceposts, laid the plates on top of them, and laid the track on top of them, with nothing fastened together at first. When the track and stringers were positioned properly under the track, I nailed the plates to the stringers. Then I used a level and shims to raise each stringer to the correct height and spiked it to the posts. Now you could probably walk on the thing, it's so solidly built, but it's ugly, and likely to stay that way for a while. Soon after I build that part of my railroad, I learned about Bill Logan's much more attractive and almost idiot-proof method using HDPE lumber. Oh well, at least I can say I tried this once.
June, 2002, June, 2003 Open Houses - We have now entertained visitors from all over the country and from many different walks of life. By June, 2002, many flowers and groundcovers that had taken years to establish suddenly came into their own, and our open house photos from those days show a flourishing garden, not the desert wastelands of 1998 and 1999. We held open houses for folks attending the 2002 National Garden Railway convention in Cincinnati.

We had an open house for our second daughter's graduation in early June, 2003, and received many great comments then, too. When people who've been here more than once say how much better things look than they used to, I honestly have to say that much of it is simply due to plants we started in 1998 and 1999 finally "coming into their own." We even have a joke that you can tell how old a garden railroad is by how many square feet of Woolly Thyme it has--the woollier the garden, the older it is.

A couple weeks later, we participated in a Miami Valley Garden Railway Society open house and had many visitors from the area. My friend and frequent mentor in garden railroading, Wil Davis, brought his digital camera and later gave me a disk copy of his photos. More information about that open house, including several of Wil's photos is shown at the following link.


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