The Start of the Coastal Titans Railroad

The start of my garden railroad, its origin story if you will, traces back to a Barnes and Noble cafe. Back when my wife, Sharon, and I were starting to look for our first house, we would pass many an evening at the bookstore. It was like a library but with late night caffeine. After perusing the shelves, we would usually grab a couple of magazines to look through with our drinks. We collected ideas of what we wanted in our house. Beautiful light, brightly colored walls, hardwood floor. As we found pictures that we liked we would buy the magazine and save the pictures. Still have the scrapbook. And the house might have echoes of a few of those ideas. We also dreamed of gardens. Sharon, growing up in the big city, could count the plants she had on one hand. The plants, not the types. In response, she had the gardening bug. We looked at grand estates. And little porch gardens, Anything with color overlaying a lush green foundation.

One evening while picking through the garden magazines we ran across this crazy combination: a model railroad in the garden. Garden Railways. Boy, people will put anything in the gardens, won’t they. Growing up I had the typical kid’s fascination with big trains. One of my favorite pictures was my grandfather holding me in my blue-striped overalls in front of a caboose. I have no memory of that day, just the photo. There were a few model trains in my life but not much. But I’ve always had a fascination with transportation infrastructure. How the roads weave together in overpasses, how the taxiways connect runways to terminals at the airport. How roads, waterways, and railways snake across the countryside from town to city to destination. So I enjoyed looking through the magazine and imagining the track routes. Sharon enjoyed seeing the gardens intertwined with something fun and playful. It was a nice counterpoint to the beautiful and proper grand estates often highlighted in stories. It would be many years before that seed would germinate.

Years later, and many garden ideas later, Sharon gave me a starter train set. She has a wonderful way of catching some passing idle dream and turning it into gifts that spark new adventures. I was totally surprised. I set up the little circle around a whiskey barrel water garden on the deck and ran circles around it. But that wasn’t enough. We started dreaming of what the railroad could become. I borrowed books from the library. Most bookstores were now gone, as were many of the magazines they held, and late night caffeine now happened at two in the afternoon. But the library had a few books on garden railroads. Winter came and it was time to dream instead of play.

We started thinking about where in the yard it would go. We both liked the idea of the railroad being playful and fitting into the garden instead of being a model railroad with plants as an afterthought. It would be more like moving garden art. Maybe it could go here? But how would it run through this planting? What would keep the weeds from the tracks? The plants here would flop over the tracks. Many options and many problems to solve. Turning to the internet, and Garden Railways again, I started collecting ideas. A raised track would solve many problems. Less disruption to the garden bed. Easier to get to. Protection from smaller plants flopping over. The first summer I extended the track to a double oval and set it up on the deck where we had to walk around it. I also started building a temporary raised platform trying out several different designs. I strung several together on 4x4 risers and set it out in the garden.I’d run the engine around until the uneven surface caused derailings. I had already checked off several ways not to do things and explored my vast unhandy skills. I joined the Tidewater Big Train Operators and had some good discussions with members. Saw ideas at shows. Bill gave me a few pointers. It was time for the next idea.

At home, we settled on a location. A garden that we had rehabbed a few years earlier. It had been full of yuccas that would poke me every time I mowed. We took some of the yuccas out (boy that was fun!) and added some non-pointy plants. Most were non-flowering giving it a prehistoric look. We called it the dinosaur garden. Luckily, it wasn’t attracting dinosaurs like the butterfly garden attracted butterflies. We surveyed a route, imported the data into a design tool and had our first design (See The Lay of The Land (1:1) for more details). And I had a new idea for how to build the railbeds. I got a few pieces built up in between our other hobbies (plus the always-time-eating day job) before winter came again. Then in January 2019, we were both furloughed from our jobs during the government shutdown. Lucky for the railroad, the weather was unusually warm and dry during that time. And I had a lot of extra free time. A lot more mistakes were gotten out of the way. But we could see how it would come together. I installed about 10 feet of track and could run an engine back and forth.

With this momentum, I started making real progress. Segment by segment I would learn something new and relearn something from before. High hopes turned into some failures that were frustrating, but the next day or weekend I’d be out there trying again. The first curve has been installed at least four times. I’ve installed the wrong piece of track at least twice. And there are a few places where the railbed doesn’t really line up. By late summer the successes were outnumbering the failures and we could see progress. The track was getting longer. We could add a car to the engine without cutting run time in half. We could use a switch. The train would disappear behind some plants. It still had to come out the way it went in but the vision was taking hold.

Meantime we worked on the story. We played up the idea of the dinosaur garden. It would be like Thomas goes to Jurassic Park. A tourist line through a fantastical environment complete with enormous plants (don’t have to worry about getting scaled plants) and amazing dinosaurs. I started dreaming up the backstory. The important, but lost to history, explorer who stumbled upon this land lost in time (with thanks to Conan Doyle). And now it will be a great tourist attraction. The name came last after lots of options were thrown around. We wanted to tie in the flat, sometimes floody landscape we live in, with the enormous size. We settled on Coastal Titans.

On Sept 23 I had my first run around the completed loop. Phase 1 of the Coastal Titans railroad was operational.

 Phases two to six are already in the dream stage. Find out more and follow the progress of the Coastal Titans Railroad at https://coastaltitansrailroad.blogspot.com