I attended the annual "Rails in the Garden" tour in Tucson today. This was put on by a bunch of model train enthusiasts (extremists?) who build scale train layouts in their backyards and gardens. This years tour involved visiting eight different houses.
This house had a really nice backyard (I really liked the beehive fireplace). Their train layout was in the planter back where two guys are standing. The next picture shows the layout in more detail...
Two separate tracks, two trains. My picture doesn't do them justice, but most of the trees in the layout are all living bonsai trees of various sorts. Very cool.
This was a huge backyard layout -- over 1000 feet of track and lots of neat features including water features, an open pit mine that rail cars would descend into, and a really neat locomotive roundtable.
To the left you can see part of the locomotive roundtable. It was really well built with a very realistic "dirty" industrial feel that I'd expect around a real rail maintenance facility for that era.
Another portion of the big layout. Note the cliff dwellings build into the mountains in the background.
My still pictures don't do justice to the actual moving trains, so I made a 25 sec low-res video using my camera to show that the trains really do move!
Warren -- those railroad layouts are so cool! The next time the modellers up here put on a show of actual garden set-ups, I am going to try to get a ride to see them...
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