| That winter I worked in New Orleans on a contract. At a hobby shop near the airport, I picked up a basket case Lionel Atlantic and ordered the missing parts for it when I got home. The Lionel wasn't quite in proportion with itself, but once I reassembled and repainted it, it looked very nice dragging an AristoCraft long haul tender I bought used on the Internet and repainted. |  |
| Spring, 1999: Having a Garden Railroad -. I spent the next spring babying the plants I had put in the previous spring and planting new ones. The miniature "peppermint-colored" tulips were yellow and red and about a foot tall. Still, they add some needed brightness early in the season. They've even spread |  |
| I also rebuilt the Lionel Atlantic several times and took it for many test drives, sometimes without running gear, as some early photos show.
It took a season before the woolly and creeping thyme looked like they were going to establish at all. For that reason the "garden" still looked like I ought to be running D&RGW instead of PRR for most of the season.
I also kept transplanting plants that looked useful from perennial gardens around the house. I tried to choose plants that stayed small and had fine foilage. Unfortunately, many of these grew much larger on the garden railroad where they received more attention. |  |
| Summer, 1999: The Tunnel Appears - I began work on what would become the tunnel with a waterfall over it. I used big solid cement blocks to build a wall on each side of the track. After trying several solutions, I built a a platform made of pressure-treated 2x10s cut in pie shapes and covered it with pond lining. Then I put a plastic "creek" from a hardware store and surrounded it with dirt and rocks. I also put rock walls near the tunnel to make the curve look more "necessary," and stuck sedum everywhere, hoping to make the rock piles look less like rock piles. |  |
| I also began thinking about expansion. I had already begun adding ties and backfill to the north of the first loop. Essentially, I planned to put a "return loop" at the north end of the garden area so the train could go away and come back, instead of just circling the pond. While working my way north, I modified my original plan of a "pure" dogbone in which the north and southbound tracks would be parallel, and decided to separate the tracks by a few feet so I could insert some scenery between them and camouflage the "return" track somewhat. |  |
| Spring, 2000: Open House Preparation - After a warm wet spring,I discovered that many of my plants had apparently decided to make the best of the situation. My oldest daughter was graduating and we were going to have a big open house, so we had extra incentive to make the gardens look nice, especially the one with the pond and the trains. The week of the open house, a huge branch from an ailing tree on an adjacent property fell across the pond, adding a layer of complication I didn't need. |  |
| June, 2000: Open House Success - At Kristen's open house, my youngest daughter, my cousins' kids and several other children spent most of the afternoon running trains and playing with accessories I put out for them. Though this wasn't an official garden railroad "open house," the railroad was a very big hit. |  |
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