Fifty Years of Modern Garden Railroading


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Written by Paul D. Race for Family Garden Trains(tm)

Fifty Years of Modern Garden Railroading

The LGB Stainz, an Austrian switcher that started a revolution. Click for bigger photo.

In 1967, Ernst Lehman Patentwerks created a charming Alpine-looking train set pulled by an Austrian-inspired 0-4-0T locomotive called the Stainz. Although I have friends who saw, and even began ordering those trains for their American stores in 1967, the Lehmann "Big Trains" (LGB for short, Gross Bahn, in German) officially debuted in early 1968 at the International Toy Fair, held in Nuremburg every year.

Today, most people are counting 2018 as LGB's "golden anniversary." Most garden railroaders also count 2018 as the "golden anniversary" of the modern garden railroading movement. And that's quite reasonable, because that's the year most people saw LGB for the first time.

LGB Didn't Invent Garden Railroading, but They Revived It - Garden railroading had long been popular in Europe, especially England. It had been a respectable, if small, hobby in the United States in the early 20th century. But it had gone out of fashion as trains became smaller, and it became possible to build an empire in the basement or a spare bedroom. The new LGB trains appealed both to "indoor" model railroaders looking for new challenges and to people who'd never owned trains before, but fell in love with the things.

For years, LGB vendors in North America couldn't get trains in fast enough. Though other vendors, including American companies, got involved eventually, it is entirely fair to give LGB all the credit for reinvigorating the hobby of garden railroading on this side of the "pond."

Fifty Years On - As we celebrate fifty years of modern garden railroading, we can't help but notice how many things have changed, how many things have not changed, and how many things changed once or twice, then came back around.

LGB is Going Strong (Again)

After a rough patch that included two-and-a-half bankruptcies, asset seizures by creditors, and multiple changes of ownership, Lehmann Patentwerks, owners of LGB trains, is going strong again. Because their most recent "white knight" was a toy company who's never made this sort of thing before, there were concerns that the line would be cheapened or would not expand beyond starter sets. But as more LGB products become available again, fans of LGB are beginning to breathe easier.

Many Others Have Come and Gone

In the 1980s, when garden railroading was really beginning to catch on in North America, there was a growing demand for trains that looked at home on American rails. Companies like Kalamazoo and Delton formed to fill that gap and were successful for a time. Existing companies like Lionel, MDC/Roundhouse, Maerklin, and MTH began dabbling in US-style garden trains. Another old model train manufacturer, Bachmann, got into garden trains in a big way, literally. And two large hobby shops, Polks' and Charles Ro, started their own lines - AristoCraft and USA Trains, respectively. Sadly, very few of those lines have survived to this day. But each of them "raised the bar" in their own way and attracted new people to the hobby.

At this time, several manufacturers are still making garden trains worth looking at, depending on what continent and era you would like to model. The following table is an oversimplifaction, since several of the vendors have dabbled in products outside of their core scale and era, but it should give you some idea.

US 19th- to Early 20th Century US Early-to-Mid 20th Century US Mid-20th Century to Modern European

Bachmann: American Narrow
Gauge trains, including entry-level 1:22.5 train sets and high-end 1:20.3 models

LGB Mogul and other Narrow Gauge Products PIKO: 1:32-ish American Standard Gauge trains

MTH 1:32 Standard-Gauge American trains USA Trains: 1:29 Standard-Gauge American trains
LGB 1:22.5 Euro Trains

PIKO: 1:32ish European Trains

Maerklin European Trains

For the convenience of our members, I've tried to keep a list of easily-available starter sets in each of the above categories in a buyer's guide page.

Also, many of the products of companies that have fallen by the wayside are still available on the used market, still serving the needs of old-timers and new-timer alike. We have begun reviewing those "fallen flags" in a series of articles here.

In an interesting twist, USA Trains and Bachmann make brass track that follows the example of defunct company AristoCraft. Screw-on rail joiners don't last forever, but they give a better connection and stay conductive longer than the slip-on rail joiners that LGB and PIKO use.

Building for the "Long Haul"

Putting the discussion of available trains ahead of the most important material is an occupational hazard, I suppose. But if the past fifty years have taught me anything, it's that most hobbyists, including "thought-leaders" and influencers have overestimated the importantance of the trains and underestimated the importance of the settings where those trains are supposed to run - and that has actually limited the hobby's growth.

When I started investigating the hobby in the early 1980s, only one method of garden railroading was widely promoted in books and magazines. Unfortunately, the "pouring gravel in trenches and laying track on top of it" approach works a lot better for people who live in the desert and have young backs that it does for the rest of us.

Now there are several popular methods, including gravel or concrete in trenches, as well as raised pressure-treated or HDPE roadbed. Personally, I'm experimenting with a new construction method that I'll be reporting on as work on my new garden railroad progresses, but, in a way, every garden railroad is an experiment, and we have reached the stage in the hobby where hardly anybody with a lick of sense is going to tell you you're doing it "wrong."

One thing has become evident - in the long run, HOW you build your railroad is more important than what brand or scale of trains you use. As examples:

Ground-level railroads only last as long as the owners' backs and knees.
Railroads that require a lot of schlepping or weeding every time you want to run trains are doomed to be run seldom and die early of neglect.

As Yogi Berra once said, "You can observe a lot by just watching." Many, many garden railroaders who used to tell me I was not as "serious" as them because they used more expensive trains or different scales or more elaborate track plans or fancier buildings or nicer figures or whatever have long since left the hobby because the railroads they built either failed to withstand the long-term forces of nature or were built without maintenance or the aging of the owners in mind.

This isn't an "I win, you lose" scenario - it's a source of disappointment that failing to take the "long view" when it comes to landscaping, construction, and gardening issues has cost the hobby so many active members.

I confess, that my own construction articles don't all address this as well as they should. To see some of the new methods we'll be experimenting with on the new New Boston and Donnels Creek, go to the New Boston home page and scroll down until you get to the 2017 articles.

And while you're planning your garden railroad, be sure to pay attention to our Accessible Garden Railroads article as well.

Garden Railways Magazine is Still Here

Marc Horowitz, who published a newsletter called "Sidestreet Banner" in the early 1980s, started Garden Railways magazine in 1984. In 1996, the magazine was purchased by Kalmbach, publisher of Model Railways magazine. Like the hobby, the magazine got a little "thin" during the recessions of 2001 and 2008. After all, you need advertising and subscribers to pay for those extra article pages that they used to publish in the "fat" years. But it is still going strong.

You might think that everything worth saying about garden trains had been said by, say 2006 (except maybe for new product reviews. But in the early 2000s, a new batch of contributors joined up and presented both new solutions and old solutions with a new twist. Recent articles on DCC and other emerging technologies have continued to keep the magazine current and effective.

What Does the Future Hold?

My sense is that garden railroading will continue to be a great hobby choice for many families, but its long-term health and growth would improve if the hobby's other thought-leaders and influencers started encouraging newbies to put the same amount of thought and resources into the construction and long-term viability of their railroad as they would on, say, adding any other major landscaping feature in their back yard.

Many garden railroaders and would-be garden railroaders have invested five to ten times as much in trains as they have in the infrastructure to run them on and the setting that surrounds them. That's backwards - frankly you'll be far better off if you start out investing in a raised, low-maintenance railroad with good, wide-radius track in an attractive setting, and starting out with one or two "starter set" trains to run on it.

And you can still start small, if that's an issue. Our simple, raised railroad offers one example. At the moment, we're working out another approach that I think will be even more helpful for many people, so stay tuned.

More to come - stay tuned!

Paul Race

FamilyGardenTrains.com

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