Take a tour of the

Oregon Pine Belt Railway

The Pine Belt is a Large Scale layout. It is not scale-specific, meaning it has rolling stock ranging from 1:32 up to 1:20.3. The Bachmann Shay in this picture is a 1:20.3 "F" scale locomotive. The cars right behind it are the same size as similar cars marketed by LGB at 1:22.5, though they are also consistent with cars in 1:24. What's the difference?

The loco is supposed to represent a 35 ton Shay, a fairly small engine, yet it dwarfs the boxcar right behind it, a car that should be as tall as it is. You can drive yourself nuts with such comparisons, or you can get a glass of iced tea, sit back, and watch the trains roll.

1:20, 1:22.5, and 1:20.3 (F, G, and H) scales tend to model narrow gauge equipment, much of it from the 1880s to the 1920s. This is really cute stuff.

I also have a modest collection of 1:29 "A" scale rolling stock that runs on the same track. It models more modern standard gauge mainline equipment. Generally, I tend to keep all of the Mainline equipment in separate trains from the Narrow Gauge, even though I may have trains of each on the layout at the same time. One thing you learn is to keep them relatively apart from each other and not encourage the eye to make size comparisons.

Here's an example of two trains in different scale neighborhoods. The SP diesel is pulling a string of 1:29 freight cars the same scale as it is. Parked at the head of the yards is an F scale (1:20.3) Climax loco and a string of G scale (1:22.5) cars. Technically, the Climax is 45% larger than the Geep, but separation and perspective minimizes that difference.

The windmill is H (1:24) as are the cars in front of the store which is a birdhouse of indeterminate scale. The scale of plants is another issue entirely, one I avoid by simply ignoring it. I put in the plants I like that also like being on the Pine Belt. At the edge of the pond is "penny royal", a member of the mint family with a nice, minty smell when crushed.

The layout is built around full-sized trees to which we have added dwarf trees such as boxwoods and spruces, and a variety of perennials and annuals. A very large goldfish inhabits the pond while noisy bluejays scold from overhead as the dog and cat (scale 30 feet and 25 feet respectively) wander around the layout. The diesel exhaust and the Climax steam was added in Photoshop.

The OPBR is really not very large, being only about 20 feet by 40 feet, but we manage to pack a fair amount of action into that space. This is an early photo, in the fall of 2000 just a couple of months after initial construction was completed. The pond and falls will not be constructed until the following summer.

A maple tree shows its colors from between two cypress trees. Barely visible on the left is another maple. Next to the covered bridge is a white flowering dogwood and the bridge crosses the dry creek that drains its basin. The claredendrum is in full flower. This is a tropical tree that almost like having a 30 foot jasmin; the scent from the flowers is pungent and spicy. Behind it is an aspen.

All of these trees dump leaves, twigs, needles and other arborial detrius on the layout, requiring inspections before running and aggressive leaf removal. Yet I wouldn't change it; on 100 degree days in Southern Oregon, the bench in the foreground is shady and relatively cool. Sitting on it, facing the railroad, is looking south. Most of our plants need to be shade-tolerant as a result. We modified the existing sprinkler system to water the layout. Daily watering in the summer means that trains must come in every night.

Trains spend more time in the shed come winter, but we get out to play, even when it snows! A common question asked is if I take the track up in the fall. Not a chance; laying track is too much work to have to redo it every year. Fortunately, the track is made of brass and the ties are UV resistant plastic.

Model railroad trains don't do any better with snow than the real things. Thus, I had to run a plow before this picture could be shot. I made my own plow out of aluminum press plate material, applying duct tape to the lower edge so the plow wouldn't short out the track. I attached it to the front of this GP9 and ran it around a couple times before taking it back off. I now have an Aristo-Craft push plow attached to my track cleaning gondola.

The snow was pretty wet and didn't last long, being largely melted by afternoon. Southern Oregon winters at our elevation (1100 feet) are not known for much snow; cold winter rains are more the rule. Good drainage is essential. The floor of the tunnel is a low point on the line, but good drainage prevents water from pooling there. As you build a layout, these are points to consider. In this case, I created a French swale by digging a trench from the tunnel to the front by the bench, filling it with 3/4 minus gravel and then covering it with bark chips.

There are many reasons for having a garden railway, but this is by far the best. Children love trains. Miss Vickie is my granddaughter and she especially loves Chessie, in part because she has the book Chessie the Railroad Kitten. She likes to touch Chessie and name her parts, pointing out the horn, the bell, the headlight, and so on. Chessie is an Aristo-Craft U25B.

In the foreground atop the rock wall are dozens of small, interesting rocks from around the area. She likes to pick one out and carry it around while she watches the trains and names the cars.

She orders me around shamelessly and I love it. She calls out her own train, starting with, "Chessie, Papa, and Geep." Or maybe she'll want Alco on the point. Then she indicates and names various cars which go on behind. Then she helps me run the Train Engineer remote control before we retire to the bench to watch. My wife Sherry (AKA Mimi) brings out juice and snacks while we all relax with the train.

I discourage people from climbing on the layout; it causes too much wear and tear, but we let Vickie walk over to watch Casper the Goldfish in Lake Casper, named after him. If she's in the way, I simply stop the train until she hops back down.

Another good reason to have a garden railway is to use it for business purposes. The Pine Belt is a real, working railroad, though the work isn't the usual transportation expected of trains. Rather, the business is testing and review of new products on the market.

The SD40-2 pulling the train was just such a review product in its time, but this photo was shot as it pulled a pair of Rio Grande 50 foot boxcars that were the subject of review that day. All three items are from USA Trains and represent modern mainline equipment.

I am a contributing editor for Model Railroad News and take a lot of work home with me! The Large Scale branch of the hobby is enjoying a renaissance of quality products at this time.

In this picture, we are testing couplers. One of the biggest problems in all of model railroading is couplers. Often--and especially in Large Scale--each toymaker has its own coupler design. Most coupler designs don't play well with others, and some don't even play well within their own make!

Like so many people, I had a layout divided by couplers. Long trains were nearly impossible because couplers either opened by themselves, wouldn't couple in the first place, or "popped", my term for when one coupler goes down and the other up such that they come apart.

I finally took the plunge and came up with enough Kadee Couplers to equip two locomotives and a dozen cars. At the time of this shot, both Chessie and Geep have been changed to Kadee, as well as the first 13 cars of this train. From that point back we have stock knuckle couplers, only nine cars long. The train made a dozen laps without a train-in-two, a major milepost in Pine Belt history.

Today, I have installed Kadees on the entire running fleet. As a result, I can run much longer trains than this one!

We test all sorts of things on the Pine Belt. This is a digital video camera mounted on the chassis of a Bachmann logging caboose. It gets pulled in the train (or pushed) in order to get "on board" shots. On Board videos are not new in garden railroading, but digital video is.

The companion piece of this project is a Macintosh computer running iMovie software. A firewire port allows the video to be played directly into the computer where it is stored in clips. This raw footage can then be edited rather easily and intuitively. I found the whole process to be fun, in large part because I never had a single crash, either railroad or computer!

My local computer store wishes they could get as bulletproof a DV editing system for the PCs they sell, because they could move hundreds of such solutions along with the cameras. Unfortunately, such a solution does not currently exist for Windows machines. The products that do exist are highly crash-prone and buggy. Expect that to change with the market potential.

If you can survive a 6 mb download, I have a Pine Belt music video set to the tune of "Long Train Runnin'" by the Doobie Bros. This is the "tiny window" Quicktime version and runs 3 minutes and 46 seconds. Download 6 mb QT video

Hi-tech toys aside, garden railroads are about the people who enjoy them. The secret to creating interest in any layout is to always look for two things: the serpentine and peek-a-boo qualities of trains. This cut leads around behind a hill, beyond public view only to emerge from the tunnel in an elaborate, snake-like peek-a-boo.

Train trundles across Victoria Bridge, named for my granddaughter who tested it thoroughly when she was two and a half. At that tender age, she toddled over and climbed up on it! It survived her assault, proving its design qualities.

I scratch-built it out of redwood, using both nails and a construction-grade glue called Liquid Nails. After four years of exposure, it's still doing fine.

The row of white board sticking out of the ground are redwood slope retainers. This is one of those geological trouble spots that all garden railways seem to have. During the summer of 2001, that entire hillside was removed and a trestle was put in its place, continuing off of the bridge. An old railroad song opines, "We built the railway in '76 and we've built it every day since." I now have a better appreciation of those lyrics. Like every other railroad on the planet, this one is always a work in progress.

Questions or comments? Email them to me at trainchaser@trainchaser.com