Welcome to the new Garden Trains Annual

You can build a beautiful garden railway in your own backyard! Here’s a scene from the Berkley Garden Railroad that incorporates landscaping blocks, “scale” plantings, and realistic town scenes.

Welcome to the new Garden Trains Annual

Chris Lane, EditorWelcome to the debut issue of the Garden Trains Annual for 2021! We are glad you have joined us, and we looking forward to bringing you many exciting ideas, projects and layouts in the coming years. We love trains and we love to build things, so let’s get started!

You may be wondering at a time when other hobby magazines, and indeed, magazines in general, are shutting down why we would offer a brand new publication? The answer is simple; White River Productions is bullish on both the hobby and hobby magazines, and we have been looking at offering a product in the large scale field for some time. Now is that time, and we felt our proven “Annual” format was right way to do it.

First, a bit about White River Productions. We have been publishing books and railroad historical society magazines since 1994. Our founder and president Kevin Eudaly is a well known railroad photographer and photo collector, and his father is a well-known O scale modeler. Our corps of editors is not drawn from snowmobile magazines or local shopping papers, but rather are all passionate, life-long railfans, model railroaders, and many of us are both. We love trains, and that shines through in our publications, which include HO Collector, Model Railroad News, Narrow Gauge & Short Line Gazette, O Scale Trains, Passenger Train Journal, Railfan & Railroad, Railpace Newsmagazine, Railroad Model Craftsman, Trains & Railroads of the Past, along with the the On30HOn3, Passenger Train, and Railroads Illustrated annuals. So miniature trains in the great outdoors? Yes, please!

I’m a Colorado native, so trains — especially narrow gauge — have been my love since basically birth. My wife Cay is a Durango native and grew up right across the river from the Silverton line, so she is a train lover as well. We both love to garden and enjoy hiking and the recreational activities our state offers, so serving as editor of this publication is right up my alley. You can find more about me, my large scale, and other modeling efforts inside the magazine.

So what can you expect in this and future issues of the Garden Trains Annual? For starters, great building and how-to projects. We are big believers in hands-on railroading and that guides our formatting of every issue, and we’ll go as deep into a topic as needed to give you the skills and confidence to try it. Those projects will run the gamut from simple, accomplish in a few hours, to very in-depth and detailed. We understand our potential readership’s skill levels and experience is going to vary widely, and we will make sure there is plenty for everyone in each issue. And I’ll take this time to urge you to keep this and future issues handy. They are designed to be referenced and your skills and interests will undoubtedly evolve over time, and you’ll find articles that don’t grab your attention now, will likely be timely in the future.

We’ll feature a mix of interesting layouts, and while most of our readers railroad outdoors, we’ll venture inside occasionally for those of you who do a mix of both or are curious about large scale inside. We will feature live steam, but will stay away from the ride-on sizes. Speaking of sizes, I can guarantee we’ll cover a variety scales both larger and smaller, but the primary focus will be equipment that runs on 45mm track.

We’ll sprinkle in some information and history about real trains as appropriate, and while we may provide information about how many rivets there were, we will never count the rivets on your models. Because, and this is the big takeaway, we believe in the fun of large scale railroading. We take trains very seriously, but we don’t take ourselves or the hobby too seriously. That would look too much like real life and who needs that? Welcome and let’s have some fun!

—Chis Lane, Editor

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Garden Trains Annual

This article was posted on: November 15, 2020