Garden Trains: Garden Railway Tour - Tom Gaps' Lone Pine and Western RR 

Yes it is one of the nicest we have visited.

Thank you kindly!

Thanks for watching!

It is a sweet set up.

All of the track and switches are Sunset Valley Narrow Gauge Brass.

We had one club member bring a live steamer but as luck would have it, it ran out of fuel just as it entered the 35' long tunnel and died about half way through the tunnel. There are access ports into the side of the tunnel at 3' intervals, but they are too small to work on or extract a live steam locomotive so we had to get an battery electric locomotive to couple on and drag the live (dead?) steam back out. After that, he lost interest in running his steamer on my railroad.

Haha typical Murphy's law

If your plan is for a DISPLAY railroad, then you can save a lot of money on battery-R/C conversion by putting all of the electronics in a trailing [box] car with a power and lighting cable from this car to the locomotive. You can connect this trailing battery-R/C control car to which ever locomotive you want to run. You can have as many locomotives as you want and switch the car from locomotive to locomotive. If you want to run more than one locomotive at a time, then you need extra power/control cars. Three of these cars will let you run any combination of three locomotives at the same time. However, if you plan on doing operations, with lots of switching, then having to drag around a power/control car behind the locomotive and not being able to disconnect the locomotive from the car while switching can be a bit of a restriction on the operating session. The power/control car is a quick way to get lots of locomotives running on battery-R/C and over time you can move the electronics from the power/control car to a specific locomotive and eliminate the need to drag this car around everywhere the locomotive goes.

Ok Tom. Not going to display anything to anyone and cant afford lots of Locos.

So how did it all turn out?

insulate it . cheaper and more enviro frendly

All of my switches are Code-250 from Sunset Valley and I have all #6 switches, or #4 Wyes. I use Sunset Valley ground throws for the switches that are easy to reach and I use pneumatic switch motors, also from Sunset Valley, for the switches that are out of easy reach. The pneumatic switch motors are mounted on the bottom of the switch, out of site. They sit in a half pipe of black PVC to protect them. I use Sunset Valley switch stands, with the control handled removed, on all of these remote switches to give me feedback visibility of the switch setting.