I was blessed today with visiting the gorgeous, endless, and completely functional garden railroad of Deb and Stan Ames in Massachusetts.

It was rainy today, so not much operation was going on. However, all the track is used during their ops sessions.

The layout is railpowered DCCcontrolled, with stainless steel track. Stan has built many of the turnouts himself, including those for the dual gauge (F/Fn3) area toward the end of this video.

Amazing garden work and concrete work (mostly by Deb, I believe), and bridges and tunnels everywhere. What a treat to chat with them and tour their layout, rain or no rain!



A few notes, based on comments I've received:

1. This isn't my layout, it's the Ames'. You can look up their names with "garden railroad" and get more info.

2. The layout is designed and run for operations. Each weekend, teams of people get an engine, and assignments on where to pick up cars from and where each car needs to go. It's kinda an allday thing, run by a dispatcher.

3. Each team consists of an engineer (with the remote control) and a conductor (with a walkietalkie to the dispatcher).

4. Loco's are stored either in a shed (into which they just drive in) or in tunnels. Cars are left wherever they ended up, and generally stay there till the next op session.

5. The layout is entirely railpowered, fed by 22v DCC and a Zimo DCC control system. Deb is the controls guru. Rail is stainless and rarely needs cleaning. Turnouts are handmade by Stan.