Finally came across a way you can combine your wife’s love of gardening and your love of toy locomotives, huh? As the young folks say these days, g scale is definitely the bomb! You get to have fun in the sun while designing your own personal toy locomotive theme park. But how to begin? Your outdoor space will have a major say in the type of design you choose.  That said, there are some basic considerations when you are creating your g gauge train setup.

Use the topography of your yard to frame the choices you make in terms of circuit design choice:  One of the best choices you can make is to use the particulars of your yard as one of the major factors in deciding the type of train and the design of your g scale model railroad layouts.  If you live in the Arizona desert and your backyard is a stone garden, consider choosing a kind of train and track that was typical of the American Southwest like the Sante Fe type locomotives that are widely available. If your yard is packed with fruit trees and vegetable patches you’ll have fun thinking up ways that you can whirl your track through it. Climate and terrain are just as significant as spatial considerations for g scale trains.  These topographical features, however, can also greatly help the realism and the complexity of our railroad designs.

Play peek-a-boo with your track plan:  One of the best ways of [adding|maximizing|increasing] interest to our g [scale|gauge] model railroad [layouts|designs|setups] is to use the [flora|bushes and trees|hedges and plants] of our back yards to enhance the visual [interest|excitement|enjoyment] of our track [plan|design|layout].

Play peek-a-boo with the viewer by winding the train behind the natural features of the yard. The simple way is to run your track through a bush, but if you’re really ambitious you might construct a mountain pass or rugged  gorge right in your back yard.  There is something really wonderful too about seeing the g scale locomotive make its way obscurely through the dark shadows behind a hedge of bushes.

Don’t fight with the big stuff:  If you have a completely empty yard then this is not a consideration, but since most of us have things other than trains and grass in your back yards, your best bet is to take these backyard landmarks and work with them.  Waterworks can really add a relaxing element to your garden railroad. A train track looped around a trickling stone fountain or past a spitting stone angel can make for a particularly eye catching feature.

Add landscape features to your backyard plan:  Add scaled trees, little towns, train roundhouses, peaks and lakes and all the same sorts of details and features both mimicking nature and culture, just as you would to any other train gauge.  The designing, building and detailing and weathering of these structures and features can be one of the most fun and rewarding aspects of a model railroad.  It is much more rewarding to spend in rainy Sunday afternoon detailing and coloring a model train whistle stop than watching reruns of I Love Lucy.

G gauge toy locomotives are so popular right now, you shouldn’t be surprised if you friends are willing to empty their wallets to come over and see your design. Go ahead, make people pay at the door before they can see your totally cool g train setup!

Here is more information on G Scale Model Trains. Here is a website with a free mini-course dedicated to Model Trains.

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1. Model Train Information On Scale And Gauge
2. 00 model trains and the scale they use
3. The Essential Model Railroad Track Plans
4. Special reasons to choose ho scale model trains
5. Model train scale basics