Tag: Railway
-
The Dream of a Train and a Boat, Two Stories Looking for Happy Endings
Before I was born, my grandpa built a houseboat with my grandma, mom, and uncles. This boat, named Puff, was the culmination of years of dreaming and led to years of happy memories. Decades before in the 1950s, Grandpa had been a commercial fisherman in the San Juan Islands and even ventured to Alaska once!f…
-
Goodbye Tree Over the Train
One of the struggles with having a backyard train can be nature. The very thing which makes the whole backyard train thing so beautiful and intriguing can also be the most frustrating. Queue giant Jacaranda tree in my backyard. A beautiful tree, one of the tallest in the neighborhood, with the unique ability to drop…
-
The First Attempt at a Garden Railway – Part 3
My garden railway was starting to actually look like a railroad. It had a layout that was now embedded in lovely gravel and wound its way through my backyard. However, it was a little plain. I was given a book for my birthday that went into many different ideas for backyard trains. As I looked…
-
The First Attempt at a Garden Railway – Part 2
The time had come to actually start building a train in my garden. I had the train. I had the track. I had the power-pack. I had a general vision or plan mapped out on my iPad. I also had figured out where everything would be going into the backyard. Now it was time to…
-
The First Attempt at a Garden Railway – Part 1
A year or so ago I visited a friend’s house. It had been a few months between visits and imagine my amazement and wonder when I discovered that he had installed a train in his backyard. It was gorgeous. It wound its way around the entire yard, was embedded into the patio, and had a wireless…
-
It All Started with a Train
As a kid, we moved around a lot. This led to some really interesting experiences for a growing boy but I’m going to narrow all of these down into just one story today. This is the story of where my love of trains originated (at least in my memory). Shortly after my sixth birthday, we…