What’s the first thing you know about garden railroading? Well, it takes place in a garden! That’s why they call it that!  Until this weekend we’ve been Brown Dirt Railroading…not much fun!
“I say, Brown Dirt Railroading,” sniffs the CEO. “I don’t quite get it.”

“It’s a joke,” the CFO mutters drily over his brandy. “It’s emphasizing the fact that we haven’t planted anything in the garden.”

“Well I’m not certain I get it,” the CEO coughs slightly and cleans his glasses on his napkin.

“That don’t surprise me much,” chuckles the Chief Engineer. “The  only thing I’ve ever seen you get is drunk!”

“Oh, now see here…” the CEO is flustered.

“Gentlemen,” the secretary interjects “…the narrative.”

All go silent again.

Yes, on a whim and a prayer my darling wife, the very love of my life, the Maintenance Operations Manager (or MOM, as my daughter calls her),  planted plants over the China Mountain. Now, for the very first time, the China Section is planted!

The plants, for those of you who know plants, are of the Creeping Charlie variety. They’re green, have leaves, and, well they’re there, in the garden, so to speak. Horticulture was never my subject.

Now, planting plants in the middle of existing trackage is clearly a little difficult, as the  pictures will attest.  Getting the various elements of planting to the planting zone itself was obviously a challenge; dirt appears to have gone everywhere, and water was imported from a hose rather than a judicious little watering can. But I don’t care! I’ve got Plants!

And some of the landscape features that marked the China Section have changed just a little bit. Little features like the road, which when buried by the Wonder Dog (I wonder what he’ll destroy next?) tended to disappear, must have looked like prime planting ground. And gone is the little flat spot I had cleaved (cloven?) out of the China Mountain for the quaint Chinese cottage which had, again, been modified by Mr. Zorro to the point where it just looked like a ducky place to plant a plant.  But I don’t care! I’ve got plants!

And that tunnel we so carefully blasted underneath the roadbed so that the now disappeared road could continue offstage…well, that’s filled with dirt now, and looks more like a cave.  But I don’t care! I’ve got plants!

The Tunnel Appears Plugged!

I’m joking, of course. It’s a wonderful thing MOM did by planting all that greenery, and suddenly the China Section has character. Actually, the China Section at the moment is under a web of Anti-Wonder Dog Netting. My wife and I agree that Mr. Zorro would have a field day in our field of green, digging and rooting and just having too much fun!

Anti-Wonder Dog Netting

“I can’t tell,” says the CEO. “Is he happy or not?”

“He’s groompy, ye windbag,” said the Chief Engineer. Stout number five is just finishing up, and the Chief Engineer tends to forget his manners.  “He’s a groompy sourpuss today.”

“Let’s not print that,” says the PR Guy. “That’s bad press.”

Yes, I am a little grumpy, but I am DELIGHTED to have greens in my garden. It feels so…gardeny!  It’ll take some time for the little suckers to get a hold, and there will be watering and all that stuff. But soon, my friend, soon you’ll see a garden in our garden railway!

Now, on the HO pike in your basement, you get your white glue and your little piece of lichen and, boom, you’ve got a plant. But garden railroading is real railroading, and, in this case, is real gardening! There’s watering and weeding and trimming that has to be done. I’m not sure how the rails will hold up to all of that. The dirt can be swept away…it’s the mud I’m worried about…there’s going to be mud.

We’re down operationally until the Anti-Wonder Dog netting is removed, but that’s okay. Between the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler, the damage to the Piko station platform, and stringing of electric wires, I’ve got plenty more railroading to do than just run trains!

But soon I’ll be able to run ‘em through a GARDEN!

That started me thinking about plans in general. I’m a fan of plans, really. A good plan is worth its weight in gold when it’s practicable…you can draw up the most exquisite plans in the world, but they are useless if they cannot be put into action.

What’s been drifting around in my head has been the plan for the control panel on the Paris to Peking Garden Railway (if you’re watching, you’ll notice I just squeezed in a key word, there). The design needs to be both complete and something I can build.

The panel will need to deal with track power, broken into zones, with the two turnouts, and with the structure and streetlight systems. For the sake of simplicity, I’ve decided to put all streetlights on one circuit and all structure lights on another. As you’ll recall, we’re stringing our wires overhead to the Nexus points (I think the plural is nexi, but that’s just too darned esoteric of a word!) in each section. Putting the two lighting systems on common circuits will mean only four wires on the poles…prototypical and easy to repair when The Wonder Dog strikes!

So, this is the plan for the panel. The transformer is fit into a recess on top of the panel for breathing space and ease of access.

Ah, access: the magic word for model railroaders the world over. How to provide access? In this case the question is where to provide it…where does the control panel go?

The main AC supply is in Paris (are you surprised?), which means the panel should go up there. Paris, city of lights even in 1910, will look just fine with wires traveling along some sort of bridge to get outside the rails. I’m sure this is how they do it in real life!

The panel will have its own little stand, independent of but wired to the railroad, and I’m thinking it will go right about where that big fern is now. The Maintenance Operations Manager and I have had a discussion about said fern, and all parties agree it is time to move.

I know what you’re thinking – what about the other side of the panel? Where’s the wiring diagram to make the switches work? Well, Slim, you got me there. I reckon to install the switches and then figure out how to wire ‘em – I’m not so good with thinking my way through wiring on paper. Just tellin’ you the truth, there…

The panel and its attendant stand can be built out of the junk plywo…I mean “extra” plywood I happen to have on hand as the mysterious dumpster has not yet arrived. Man! I’ve got to get working on that plywood…I have a gazillion things designed and that dumpster could show up any day!

*****

Now, I don’t normally do this, and I promise not to do it on anything except extremely important occasions, but this is one of those, so here goes:

You know how I was joking the other day about how the word “China” goes great in front of all kinds of things. I learned yesterday about an 11 year old girl named China. She’s the daughter of a friend at work. The daughter called her mom from school yesterday because she’d been hit in the face by a tennis ball. The mom, my friend, told China to wait the 25 minutes for her father to come and pick her up.

I asked my friend how China was today and she started to cry. China didn’t get hit by a tennis ball but by a tether ball intentionally whacked to hurt her. It hit her on the side of the head so hard it caused internal bleeding in her eye socket, and knocked the retina loose from her right eye. At this very moment she’s lost the sight in that eye, and the doctors don’t know if she’ll get it back.

I don’t know if you’re the religious sort, but, tonight, before you turn out the lights, could you please say a little prayer for China and her family? She’s just a kid, and I know she’s terribly scared. Your prayer would help. Thanks.

It’s no secret that I have a black thumb. I actually killed a geranium plant, and you’re not supposed to be able to kill those. In fact, it was the death of that fine looking geranium that got me banned from any manner of plant pruning here at the Turner house. My wife glares at me when I pick up the hedge clippers.

“Where are you going with those?”

“Just to trim some bushes…”

“Uh huh. Let me do that for you.”

That’s the reason I haven’t planted plants along the top of the China Mountain: clipper shock.

I was discussing the lack of plantage along the top of the hill with the Maintenance Operations Manager, or MOM, as my daughter calls her, just the other day. She suggested two things that I thought were terrific ideas.

The first was to draft up a landscaping plan to give her an idea of what to plant where. I drew my plan in MS Paint because I’m absolutely terrible at drawing curves in real life. Well, that and I’m lazy. The plan shows the shape of the China Loop with reasonable accuracy, and, when compared with the topography, should make it rather clear what to plant where.

I must point out that the word China goes really good in front of almost anything. You’ve got your China plates, of course, but here on the Paris to Peking Railway we have the China Section, the China House, the China Bridge, the Western China Turnout (I’m particularly fond of that one), the China Mountain, and the China Loop. West of the China Bridge is that much larger mountain which we shall call Magic Mountain just for giggles and grins. Anyway, things just sound more official and mysterious with the word China in front of them. I have yet to call myself China Bill, but I’m thinking about it!

Idea number two is rather novel, but it makes a lot of sense. As you know, Zorro the Wonder Dog (we wonder what he’s going to wreck next) is a major nuisance down there in the China Section (see what I mean about that China thing? Sounds cool, huh?). He’s not a digger, as I’d feared, but a jumper. His favorite place to jump is right up there to the top of the China Mountain. I had hoped that planting the Mountain would discourage him, but my wife doesn’t think so.

Her suggestion is to build a curving screen that is perhaps three feet high that fits around the outside brickwork of the China Loop. Such a screen will discourage Wonder Dog from jumping over it. He will, of course, find a way to scale Magic Mountain, but we can at least ease the pressure on the China Mountain.

My idea…I’m particularly brilliant at these things, you know…was to cut the screen in the shapes of trees. Painted a nice forest green, perhaps with detailing, the screen would provide a nice view break when seen from the railroad side, and give the shorter viewer the illusion of looking through a forest when seen from the outside. I drafted a very, very rough plan in MS Paint just to give you an idea of what we’re talking about. Pretty cool, huh? The screen will be movable to provide access to the railway, but will spend most of its days in place around the curve. I think it’s an excellent idea. And my rendering of it is, of course, brilliant.

So, what have we got? Well, now we have a landscaping plan. Maybe, with plan in hand, we’ll see some plants actually hit the ground this weekend. Maybe.

And, as the fabled dumpster has not yet arrived, I have a supply of plywood, although it’s naily, nasty stuff with a gazillion splinters. A quick cut with the jigsaw of death, a little sandpaper, a nice heavy coat of Rust-Oleum Forest Green, and, voila, an innovative Wonder-Dog-Blocker. Oh yeah, it has to be curved. Well, back to the drawing board!

Although it violates a sacred family rule, and is the kiss of death for those plants, I swear that one of these days I’m gonna rush out there and plant those darn things myself!

“I say,” the CEO nudges the CFO. “Isn’t that some sort of labor violation or something?”

“It would be,” the CFO replies sleepily, “if we had any labor.”

“Aye, ye cheap skin-flinty son of a mutant moose,” the Chief Engineer mutters into his stout.

The CEO looks over his pouty cheeks at the Chief Engineer. Clearly something is troubling his old friend.

I can tell you from a hundred miles away what’s troubling: lack of progress! Some days it seems like the railway progresses at a hundred miles an hour…new track discoveries, electrification of the rails, new buildings. But then come these terrible slows, when all we do is fight off the dog and wait for things to happen. I hate waiting for things! I want it now Now NOW!!!

Okay, that’s over with. We were actually quoite productive over the weekend. Perhaps our biggest triumph was The Rock Wall.

This new structure, assembled from the ultimate space-age material, rock, replaces the firewood logs, which temselves replaced the popsicle-stick retaining wall along the south side of the China Curve on the Paris to Peking Railway. Although compound, I do believe the preceding to be a proper sentence.

Finding the rocks in my backyard was not a problem: Zorro the Idiot Dog routinely rolls them down the hillsides and onto the rails. Placing them so that they are visually and logically pleasing was a little more challenging. Here in Southern California we have thrust mountains, with longs streaks of ancient seabed striping their faces. How cool would it be to model that?

Well, it would be cool, but it would take a lot more landscaping effort than I’ve got in these bones. I imagine you could stain concrete in various exciting desert colors and then stack ‘em up at odd angles…that would be cool, and not very hard to do. If you dyed the concrete while it was wet it would weather well, too!

Anyway, the north face of the southern side of the China Curve now has a rock retaining wall to protect the rails from the attack of Zorro the Idiot…Hold on a moment…there…I just went out and took a picture of the zone as it appears tonight, a full three days after the wall went up: holding like a champ!

As important as the retaining wall made of stone is, it is but a harbinger of things to come. The landscaping will secure the hillsides above the stone, blending all together in a natural looking pastiche that will withstand the onslaughts of wind, weather, and woofers!

“I dunna b’lieve it,” mutters the Chief Engineer. At last count he was on Stout Number Seven, which, when he’s allowed to get this far, is referred to as the “nighty-night stout”.

As if on cue, the Chief Engineer slumps face-first onto the boardroom table, snoring like a drunken railroad man. The rest of the board members tiptoe out, partly out of consideration, partly out of embarrassment, but mostly out of fear…when the Chief Engineer wakes up from the nighty-night stout he’s a real grouch!

“Just like daddy,” quips my seven year old. Yeah. Just like daddy. Charming child.

Whilst a’shootin’ pictures along the China Curve, I espied two other very, very good signs.

First is that fellow looking wistfully across the pool. I did not place that fellow there. I believe it to be the work of my little girl. That’s a good sign, as it shows she’s playing with the garden railway on her own!

The other good sign are those green plants there on top of the mountain. I did not place those plants there. I believe it to be the work of my lovely wife…I mean the Landscaping Director, er, manager, er you know, my wife. That’s a very good sign.

I do believe we shall see landscaping this weekend after all. Hoo-Rah!

Anyway, this is not a post. I never wrote this, you certainly didn’t see it. We’ll just keep it to ourselves and on one will know, okay? Okay. Thanks!

And who keeps messing with sun? Every day I come home from my 43 mile commute it seems like the darned thing is lower in the sky…weird. Next thing you know they’ll be messing with the clocks! Me? Paranoid? Who said that?

“What?!? What did you say? Rocks?”

“Aye,” the Chief Engineer squints over his pint. All of the other board members of the Paris to Peking Railway prefer to drink the CEO’s brandy at these meetings, but the Chief Engineer likes his pint of stout.

“Aye, ’tis rocks I said, and I dunna mean the ones a’tween yer ears!”

The Chief Engineer gets feisty when he drinks stout. Fortunately, the CEO gets forgiving when he drinks his brandy. It’s the secret to the survival of the railway company.

“Bu-bu-but we just tore those rocks up!”

I’ve been trying to find a balance between suitable landscaping materials and overall resistance to stupid dog attacks on the China Curve.

I tried a piddly little craft stick retaining wall (that idea, by the by, is fully explained, perhaps a little more thoroughly than I did it, in the current issue of Garden Railways Magazine…how I wish I’d written that article!). That wall disappeared on day two. I tried honest-to-Pete wooden logs…Kapow! Over they went.

“I canna stand it!” Wails the Chief Engineer. He tends to get weepy on his fourth stout.

The decision was made last week to stake the logs into the ground using inexpensive wooden wedges from Lowe’s, already in hand, thrust through holes drilled into the logs. Here’s a little secret about yours truly: I’m not just cheap…I’m lazy!

I was looking around for the right material that was both on hand and landscape oriented…thinking about a cut…what material have I seen lining a cut…what do they most often cut through? Rock, duh!

Rock is heavy and quite bug-proof: let us not forget that Garden Railroading is Real Roading. Not only that, but I seem to have grown an abundance of rocks in my backyard!

So I placed one just to see how it looked. The key lies in choosing a rough but natural looking stone. Most of my rocks are bits of broken concrete.

Now, personally, I find little piecces of concrete vaguely depressing. They are chunks of what once was. When I was a little kid we had an incinerator in our backyard. I think my dad knocked it over when it became illegal to have those things in LA County. I clearly remember making forts for my army men out of the broken concrete pieces of those things, with the big ol’ hunkin’ shafts of rusted reinforcement wire hanging out of ‘em and everything. I find it depressing (honest, doc, I don’t hate my mom!). So, concrete is right out.

Anyway, that rock looks really nice right there along the railway. I don’t know why I didn’t think of rock before…it seems so, so, natural! I took a picture of it…at least I thought I did, but now, at ten o’clock at night, I rifle my hard drives and camera drives and don’t have one! Instead I substituted that cool picture of the Station Fire, the one that is burning north of LA right now, that I shot on Sunday from the Griffith Park Observatory. I’m not a scenic picture guy, but, come on, you have to admit that is one cool picture! That’s about 200 square miles of fire making that cloud…on Monday the fire actually condensed the moisture in the air to make cumulus clouds. That is one big fire! I heard today it’s the largest in California’s history.

Back to the Railway: I have a solemn promise out of my wife- I mean the Chief Landscaping Engineering Manager-that we are GOING TO PLANT this weekend. Picture this; nice green plants that annoy the idiot growing nicely, waving in the sun along the top of the hill high above a stout, authentic looking, aesthetically pleasing palisade of China-appropriate rock. What do you think? Cool, huh?

The Chief Engineer socks the PR Guy a good one in the belly. He gets feisty on the fifth pint. The meeting is over.

Housekeeping rules: Friday nights are off, so no post tomorrow. The wife, little girl, and I went to see Ponyo a couple of weeks ago. Although not up to Miyazaki’s highest measure, it is nonetheless a very pleasant film. If you have little ones, it’s not a bad choice. You can find a review I wrote on it at www.cinemaroll.com by searching on Ponyo, and yes, that is a shameless plug. Sorry, but it’s what I do on my days off!

“So,” coughs the CEO of the Paris to Peking Railway, “how are things on the railway?”

The Chief Engineer hangs his head and doesn’t reply.

“Well,” the PR Guy fidgets with his brandy snifter, “it’s like this. We were all gung ho about the locomotive conversion…”

“…and the station buildings,” the Chief Engineer interjects without looking up.

“…and the station buildings, and sorting out the wiring on the Parisian Curve…”

“…and planking those platforms and filling up the ruddy swimmin’ pool,” the Chief Engineer prounces the word pool “pyool”, causing a brief smile on the face of the CEO, who has a fondness for his Scottish friend.

“…and, well, we just sort of forgot about the China Section…” The PR guy’s voice trails off.
“FORGOT?” The CEO roars, “FORGOT?!? HOW on God’s Green Earth could ANYONE FORGET about a railway?”

“Just for the record,” mutters the CFO, softly, “this did happen at least once before…”
The boardroom erupts in pandemonium.

It’s true. Between the various building projects and the new job, I simply haven’t had the time to visit the China Section.

What a mess! The Terror, the Idiot, Zorro the Maniac, has completely buried the rails in the China Section! I blame the dog, of course, but I blame myself, too. I haven’t pushed the Landscaping Manager hard enough on getting that hill protected.

“Aye,” the Chief Engineer raises his head, “do ya no ken that landscaping equals protet-yun from yon wee small doggy?”

Yes, well, whatever he said. Until we get that mountain in the China Section planted the bare dirt is like a magnet for that canine monster.

I had this quasi-brilliant idea this afternoon…did I mention it’s hot? It’s like a gazillion degrees out there right now, and the sun is down!…anyway, the idea was to drill holes through the logs I’m using as retaining walls and stake them into the ground. I know, I know, if you’ve ever seen anyone use railroad ties in their backyard you know that they most often stake them down. But give me a break, I thought of this all by myself, and I’m not a landscaper, and I don’t have any real railroad ties in my backyard!

So, that’s the new plan. Forget about gay Paree for the moment and get our trowel and brushes back to the China Section post haste that we might restore some degree of operations down there. The weekend is just ahead…perhaps I can persuade the Landscape Manager that THIS is the weekend to plant, now that all the digging has been done for us!

Mind you, I’d plant the mountain myself, but this is the joint part of the process…you know, if everyone does a part of the job, everyone has buy in. My little girl has decorated the station, although she’s already off to something new. If my wonderful wife has a hand in planting the mountain perhaps her interest will grow, too.

I can only tell you this: the Idiot shows far more interest in the railroad than any of us!

“Say,” pipes up the PR guy. “Do any of you guys know the difference between pea soup and roast beef?”

“I dunna ken,” responds the Chief Engineer, expecting the worst.

“Duh, anyone can roast beef!” the PR guy roars. The room explodes in gales of laughter.

“See here,” the CEO sighs, wiping the tears from his eyes, “meeting adjourned!”