Couple's garden began as a train of thought

Originally published Saturday, September 19, 1998

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

When I was a boy in Chicago, I enjoyed riding elevated trains so I could peer into the back windows of apartments and wonder about the lives of families who lived within spitting distance of the tracks.

One day I met a man who grew up in one of those apartments, who said he enjoyed sitting on his back steps and peering into the windows of the passing "L" trains and wondering about all those people packed like cattle into the Ravenswood Line cars.

Last week, I met a man who's the engineer and chief operating officer of the railroad that runs past his own kitchen window. And only his. Jim Easley's the man who makes the Bayerische Alpenbahnen run on time and on track . . . all 500 or so feet of it, in his rather intensely developed back yard in Medina.

The semiretired dentist and his wife, Lydia, are card-carrying members of the Puget Sound Garden Railway Society, a rather select interest group that is growing and doing a whole lot better than Amtrak or the stock market.

They all own and operate scale-model electric and/or steam trains in their gardens. What you thought were twinky little toys to run under the Christmas tree now are several times larger and running in the open. This ain't your daddy's Lionel or American Flyer.

To view this in perspective, most of these folks started by putting train layouts in their gardens, but pretty soon their gardens became just so much planting and landscaping in their train layouts. The Easley garden was featured in last month's Secret Gardens of Medina annual fund-raising tour for St. Thomas Episcopal Church. And it is "secret," in that you have no hint of it as you drive by their home. "Oh, one of our engines does all that smoke and bells and whistles stuff," Lydia said, "But we're not big on that, like some are."

Many of the devotees of garden railroading, like Jim and Lydia, run their layouts on several levels and several connecting lines so they can operate many trains simultaneously. Most also connect their garden train layouts to their homes, mostly so they can store their trains indoors when not running.

Lydia maintains her own raised beds of beautiful roses on one end of their 150-by-30-foot garden space, but the small mountains of Northwest boulders and the carefully crafted forests of miniature plants and the bridges over the natural waterway through the yard . . . that's all the work of Dr. Easley, chief engineer.

They joke about his "having to negotiate for more property" as his G-gauge (G for garden) railway has expanded, but Lydia draws a line in the mulch when it comes to grunt labor, such as hauling boulders to build railway tunnels and mountains. "I've worked with him and lived with him and raised a family with him, but I don't have to play train with him!" she joked.

Which isn't quite true, because the 200-some members of the local garden railway society use their monthly meetings as picnics and social gatherings. "We always have a sort of theme, and a lot of show-and-tell," Jim said as we walked alongside his gardenized railway. Locals will have a lot to show and tell in 2001, when their national convention is held in Bellevue.

Jim can run several of his trains -- some with radio controls -- on several different tracks simultaneously, he explained. But there are operating hazards just like any railroad, such as derailments when an almost-blind golden retriever named Megan stumbled over and upset the temporary rail bridge between the garden and the Easley home. Or the day an offshoot of a neighbor's bamboo patch grew several inches . . . right between one set of rails.

Like many of us boys grown to men, Jim has just found more expensive toys. But collector-vintage models of locomotives and cars from our old "O" gauge trains today probably cost more than new garden railway rolling stock. Although "starter" sets of an engine and several cars can go for as little as $375, some G-gauge engines alone cost upwards of $5,000.

The real cost -- and the real enjoyment for many -- comes not so much in owning and operating the trains, but in designing and building the layouts. "I can actually run the railway only so long," he explained, "but I can work on designing and building it to the point where I lose track of time."

He never loses sight of track, though, because it all has to fit into their backyard space. "It took me about four years to build the (two) mountains," he explained. "I'd go get some big rocks and start and then I'd strain my back and have to let that part go awhile," he said sheepishly.

Because they are both fond of Switzerland, Germany and Austria, where much of the garden railway movement has revolved around the European model train makers, the Easley's have modeled their trains and their layout, including train sheds, tunnels, depots and even churches, after real structures. Even the little Swiss chapel that Jim made by hand. It's a copy of the chapel at Boehm's Homemade Swiss Candies in Issaquah, which is itself a copy of a 12th-century Swiss chapel.