I have always been intrigued by models. Model cars, model planes, model trains, model rockets, model almost anything. I built several plastic model cars when I was in grade school. I built several model rockets when I was a teenager and launched them many times. I got away from modeling for a number of years, but always wanted to try my hand at flying RC planes. A few years ago, I finally bought myself an inexpensive trainer. I found I was much better at crashing than flying. I was also frustrated by the fact I couldn't go out and simply fly whenever I wanted, and in my own back yard. I had to wait for the right weather, and then I had to go find a big open space. My enthusiasm for RC plans was fading rapidly, and meanwhile, a neighbor who has become a good friend kept talking about garden railroads. I started looking into that, and decided to give it a try. Weather - or at least wind - wasn't a factor, and I could do this in my own back yard. And there was a bonus: You got to build an entire little town and countryside with tiny people and all sorts of fun stuff I learned the modelers called "diorama". So I started building my collection.
About the time I was ready to get serious about building a layout, Joy (my wife) mentioned that I might not want to put a huge amount of work into it in case we decided to move. What? I didn't know that was in our plans. Ok, let's get this moving thing over with sooner than later.
The move delayed my track building by a couple years. Since I didn't have a layout to actually work on in the interim, the only thing I could work on was simply collecting stuff. I guess that wasn't all bad. It also gave me the opportunity to revise the layout a few dozen times without actually moving any physical track. Some of the revisions were simply me trying to visualize something interesting. A few came after setting up an adjustable ramp that let me test my locomotives on everything from 2% to 10% grade pulling different loads. I flattened out a couple of the loops after that. But I'm still going to make the Shay live up to its name pulling logs up 5%.
I needed to start completely over on layout plans with the house move. The yard is completely different. I picked out a spot, and was originally planning to put the layout on ground level and fence it in. Then I discovered we now live on top of a big rock pile. Digging post holes was not going to be fun. In the mean time, I had heard numerous garden railroad veterans talk about the notion that the older you get, the higher off the ground you want your layout. Between the difficulty of fencing and just planning ahead (i.e. thinking about getting older), I decided to build the new layout on a raised bed.
I mapped out the spot for the new layout, and then started doing some math. The numbers were daunting. I was going to need over 1,000 concrete landscape blocks to build up the bed to a level of two feet. Thirteen pallets were delivered on an 18-wheeler. Then I needed fill. That was going to take around 100 yards - and it was delivered by eight big tri-axle dump trucks. I have my own small skid loader - that's my idea of a garden tractor. I pushed the dirt around, and prepared the raised bed. This was done in the fall of 2014, and I let it sit over winter to settle.
After much labor, the raised bed was ready to start building on. Or so I thought. I had lined the inside of the wall with roofing rubber for durability. Only afterward did somebody suggest I might have drainage problems with that. Ok, I wasn't going to worry about it if the water doesn't drain rapidly. What I didn't see coming is that the rubber acted like a big water balloon, held the water, expanded and blew up, and push the wall out. The wall was completely knocked down in a couple areas and pushed out of place by several inches in many more places following a particularly hard rain.
I dug a trench all the way around the inside perimeter of the wall, replaced the rubber with landscape cloth, rebuilt those areas of the wall that had been compromised, and put things back together.
I had originally mounded the fill up in the middle thinking I was doing the right thing for drainage. But now, with the new cloth in place around the perimeter, hard rain washed the fill away in random places around the edges. Since I was planning for a couple ponds anyway, I decided they also needed to serve as rain control catch basins. I inverted the sloping of the fill, making all water run toward the middle of the layout, or more specifically, toward the ponds which were one in each end. I also added a hidden drain field in one area. The drain fields and pond overflow pipes all route excess water to outside the layout.
I didn't have to wait long in early 2015 to rain test the rebuilt raised bed, now equipped with runoff control measures. It worked, it held, and everything was solid and storm resistant.
During all that too-much time to plan the layout, I had decided to build a couple of rather large mountains. But by now, I was also wary of hauling in another eight dump trucks of fill just to build the mountains. I also contemplated a dozen different ways to retain that much dirt in the shape of mountains, and didn't like any of them. It was going to a crazy amount of work for unimpressive results.
I started looking for alternative methods of building mountains. I had been impressed with Dutton Foster's mountain building work and wanted to build upon his inspiration. The only problem was the size of my mountains. Building them out of XPS form was going to be far too expensive, and somewhat impractical because that foam came in sheets of typically no more than 2 inch thickness.
I discovered something known as "geofoam" in my many Google searches on the subject of building stuff with foam. This geofoam was what we commonly call Styrofoam, except it came in very large blocks, and it was normally used to build roads. Yes, real roads - turns out you're driving on geofoam every time you go to the Mall of America. I purchased a truck load of geofoam from the same construction supply company that provided it for the roads around MOA.
I also knew why Dutton and others didn't like Styrofoam (that's actually a trademark name, generic name is EPS or Expanded Polystyrene). When you cut EPS with a knife or saw, you get those little balls of foam flying around and stuck to everything. But I decided I was going to get clever, and cut my foam with heat. I set out to craft my own hot wire cutter, but before I had gotten to the point actually building it, I found a source for commercially made hot wire cutting equipment. I invested in some of that equipment, and I'm glad I did because it worked beautifully.
Another concern I spent quite a bit of time experimenting with was how to coat the EPS foam to give it somewhat of a protective shell, and give it color. I experimented with many different materials over a few months, coating sample pieces of foam in my basement workshop. I was concerned with whether they adhered to the foam, whether it was durable, and whether it formed a protective layout. I was also paying attention to the texture it provided. Just painting foam leaves it looking like just colored foam. I wanted my coating material to mask the appearance of foam, and hopefully give it some rock-like texture.
Coating the foam was not the only concern. How to carve it in the first place to give some resemblance of rock structures was a complete unknown to me. I collected a bunch of sample photos from Google images as inspiration and vague pattern guides. Prior to doing the final sculpting of foam, I tested my rock sculpting on many sample pieces of foam, once again in my basement workshop. The first couple of tries didn't resemble rock at all - not even sure what they did resemble. But I eventually honed my skills to the point where blocks of foam were starting to look somewhat like natural rock. One can never completely replicate nature, but my foam carving is going to be close enough for big boy play purposes.
By fall 2015, the raised bed and artificial mountains (with real plants) were in place. The foam mountains had been hard coated and painted, and the track beds on the mountains "paved" with a mortar mix. Most of the infrastructure work was complete. Spring 2016 would see final track bed preparation on the mountains, completion of the ponds, and a variety of detail work leading up to placement of actual track on the mountains. Summer 2017 was consumed by putting down the remaining 400+ feet of track bed and track, and finishing the layout including placing the buildings (and wiring them).
All the hard work has paid off. The layout makes kids of all ages wide-eyed, even the kids with gray hair! Best of all, Birchwood & St. Croix Railroad was selected as one of only a few layouts in the Twin Cities to be featured on the tour schedule for the National Narrow Gauge Convention coming to the Twin Cities in September 2018.
Now of course if you ask a typical model railroader when their layout will be completely finished, the most likely answer will be "never"... because we are always adding something. I went to work on a major expansion in 2020, finishing up the track laying and building of the third mountain in 2022. Several new buildings were added in 2021 and 2022, and there is plenty of unoccupied space in the new area to continue adding new buildings. If I didn't have space to add new buildings, I wouldn't have anything fun to do in the winter!