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The Garden Railroad
by Susan McCoy
President
Garden Media Group
You have created a beautifully landscaped entrance to you resort. It is elegant, stately, lush and inviting. It is also quite static, a beautiful picture post card in most cases, but a post card. Want to put all that beauty in motion, and provide something visually stunning and dynamic – a perfect antidote and diversion for those families just arriving with bleary-eyed children who have been cooped up and restless in that minivan for the past several hours? In that case, think about providing your guests with a dazzling display of motion, sound and fun courtesy of one of the exciting and enduring recreational activities in the United States: garden railroading.
Neither a gimmick nor a necessarily expensive undertaking, other consumer and tourist attractions have turned to a garden railroad display as a kind of elemental, timeless attraction that has incrementally boosted attendance, at times right off the charts. Applied to a resort setting, it can be that one first impression that can leave a pleasing and lasting memory with your guests that will bring them back again next season.
In New York, Chicago, New Orleans and Philadelphia, for instance, local public gardens have added garden railroad exhibits to their facilities, and the result has been a new kind of golden spike, this time linking the once charming but staid botanical garden or arboretum with one of the fastest growing hobbies and family recreational activities in the country.
Attendance has boomed. Now, it's something public parks and recreational centers are taking note in an effort to boost utilization of their facilities.
"We recently designed a small garden railroad display for the Campbell County (Kentucky) Extension Service," says landscape designer cum garden railroad magnate Paul Busse. "We did it with a small budget of state money. And the biggest concern – security for the trains and the structures in the display has proven not to be a major problem."
Busse is now in the proposal drafting stages for a more ambitious garden railroad exhibit for the Hamilton County (Ohio) Park System, which surrounds the Cincinnati area.
What these public parks departments are beginning to realize, according to the Garden Train Association, is the tremendous appeal and attraction– especially for families –that garden railroad displays are sparking.
When the University of Pennsylvania's Morris Arboretum director Paul Meyer debuted a garden railroad exhibit in the summer of 1997, he was hoping for a jump in attendance somewhere above the seven per cent or so annual rise he had been experiencing. What he got was a whole lot more. A whole lot.
"We had 30,000 visitors that first summer," says Meyer. "That was a 900 per cent increase over the same period the previous summer. Plus we got 800 new memberships!"
There's something almost primordial about the attraction of a model train chugging its way along tiny tracks. Add the pleasures and landscaping possibilities of the garden to the design, and you have an appeal that crosses generational as well as gender lines.
Originating primarily in Britain over a century ago, garden railroading as a hobby grew quietly during the 20's and 30's, but then died out until the 1960's when the German manufacturer LGB began producing large "G scale" trains that could withstand the elements of the outdoors.
They were rugged and all of the more fragile gears and motor parts were encapsulated to keep the dirt away. After a while articles on the potential of these trains in outdoor environments began to appear in model train magazines. Charles Small, a noted railroad author, wrote about the outdoor use of LGB trains for Model Railroader in the mid 1970s. The flame was kindled. Today more than a dozen toy companies, in addition to LGB, manufacture these "G-scale" garden trains, including Aristo-Craft, Bachmann Industries, Märklin, RailKing and Hartland Locomotive Works (HLW) (see sidebar)
While the model railroad part of garden railroading is a huge $200 million a year activity involving some 200,000 enthusiasts and is primarily a Big Boy Toy, garden railroading officially has about 38,000 members spread over about 100 garden train clubs nationally.
"That 38,000 is doubling approximately every five years," says Randy Kennie, president of the Garden Train Association and national sales manager for Bachmann.
One of the reasons for that growth, believes Kennie, is that the hobby isn't just for gardeners or people who like trains. It's for the whole family. Family members who may be into electrical things, carpentry or machines can apply those interests to a backyard garden railroad.
"Research currently points to young families crossing over generations, with everyone involved in making decisions about how to build and how to add to the garden railroad as time goes on," adds Kennie.
In 1984 Garden Railways magazine began publication. It now has a circulation of around 35,000 worldwide. While covering the entire field of garden railroading, the publication stresses the importance of integrating the railway with a garden to achieve a railway-like atmosphere. It is the only model-train magazine that has regular gardening articles and its own garden editor.
Once a display is up and running, an added bonus is the media coverage powered by the garden railroad, especially from television, according to Kate Sullivan from the Morris Arboretum.
"Television loves the motion, the sound and sight of happy, smiling kids running and chasing after the trains," says Kate Sullivan, Morris's director of Marketing. "The coverage put us on the map and helped boost our attendance."
Busse believes garden railroad displays can bring both an educational and historical dimension to a park, playground or recreational center as well as attract other enthusiasts.
"Rock garden enthusiasts, miniature tree enthusiasts in addition to gardeners, horticultural hobbyists and model railroaders are all attracted to these displays," he notes.
David Koester, Campbell County Extension Agent for Horticulture, located just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, has found the garden railroad to be an excellent marketing tool attracting parents and children to its park.
"We have a three-acre garden that's open to the public from sunup to sundown all year-round," says Koester. "With just two trains and one building, we're estimating we've already doubled the number of visitors to the park."
Robert Logan, the Associate Vice-President for Audience Development for the New York Botanical Gardens located in the Bronx, suggests building your garden railroad exhibit around a theme. By doing so at the New York Botanical for the holiday season, visitors have jumped from 17,000 annually to over 100,000 since Busse built the first display in 1992.
"The idea is to choose a theme for your exhibit that you can then build into an event," says Logan. "You want people telling you, 'we come every year; we wouldn't miss it.'"
So if your resort happens to be situated in a region rich in history, especially railroad history, then a garden railroad depicted with buildings and other industrial scenes replicating those in your own region at that period of time story can certainly become a featured attraction for at your resort
Future plans for the Campbell County Extension garden, for example, call for adding replicas of a nearby historical bridge and the county courthouse. That would make the exhibit a central feature of any historical celebration the community currently conducts or may contemplate in the future.
Although Busse now designs and builds exhibits that carry hefty annual budgets that approach $100,000 or more, he says a garden railroad is the kind of project that can start small but grow as time and money allow.
"I began the exhibit at the New York Botanical Gardens with a $15,000 budget in 1992," says Busse, who does travel by real train whenever he can. "We had four trains and fifteen buildings when it debuted."
Today that exhibit has grown across two galleries of the conservatory, covers some 5000 square feet, and features 10 trains and over 100 buildings, and a $96,000 annual budget.
Busse's exhibit at the Chicago Botanical Gardens is the first one to charge a specific admission to see the garden railroad.
"It's about six to eight thousand square feet," says Busse. "You walk under two trestled bridges, through two tunnels and view a total of twelve trains. We began in 1998 with 25 buildings, which have increased to over 60 today."
Busse constructs everything from scratch, using native materials for all buildings and structures. Twigs, bark, leaves, pine cones, various pods and lichen will wind looking exactly like stone, cedar shake or window panes, as Busse turns nature's scraps into authentic replicas of local historical or noteworthy buildings.
In New York, Busse built a rendering of the Guggenheim Museum. In Chicago, he replicated the skyline including the Sears Tower, and at the Morris Arboretum outside Philadelphia, he constructed many Independence-era colonial buildings including the Betsy Ross House and Congress Hall.
Busse is currently in the proposal stages for a garden train for the Hamilton County Parks System surrounding the Cincinnati area.
Soon, perhaps, the clackety-clack of the rails and that lonesome train whistle may be just the ticket to help get your arriving guests all aboard and on track for what you're always hoping will be the most memorable vacation of their lives.
As they say, you never get a second chance to make a good first impression.