Large Scale Central

Rails in the Garden Tucson AZ

General Discussion
#1

Last year my family and I took a 140 mile ride from our home in Peoria to Tucson Garden Railway Society’s Rails in the garden open house tour. We saw I think it was 9 excellent layouts and had a great time. This year there are 8 layouts open to the public for viewing, I think 6 are new this year compared to last year, so ( and this is no knock on the Phoenix tour at all, we have seen all them at least 2 times) this Saturday we ( Me , my wife, Daughter , her husband and 2 grandkids) are going again to see the excellent layouts down in Tucson. Looking forward to taking some pictures and showing them here next week and reporting back on the fun weekend. Also putting this out if anyone who is nearby but doesn’t know about it, go to http://tucsongrs.org/index.shtml, then look for their tour info. They also provide excellent directions and maps to print out to help get from RR to RR.

here is a picture from last years tour. This gentlemans huge redwood bridges , and his whole layout is in his front yard, and was very well detailed. Excited to see it again, as you can tell .

#2

Sounds like the family will have a good time, Pete. I look forward to seeing the pictures.

#3

What a great trestle! I’m sorry I can’t make it this year. I’ll look forward to your pictures too Pete. Will make it a long term plan for next year with friends from Sierra Vista.

#4

Well we (wife daughter and son in law and 9 and 12 year old grandkids) did the day long deal to the tour, saw all 7 of the layouts that were open. Tucson is a fairly spread out city with an aversion to freeways, and all the layouts except one were way far from freeways. got to the first one at about 10:15 and it was already packed with visitors. Called the Cholla Patch RR it is nestled around and through a cactus garden so you had to be careful where you were walking, I nudged a Saguaro and was poked by it, but not as bad as this guy

He had several structures that had leaded glass windows, like this one

its the same one that has the huge trestles in the first picture, working signals and all the trestles have lights that were on also, very well detailed layout

this reminded me of David Taylors Challenge build from last year. This layout has over 1800 feet of track about 6 or 7 separate areas that can operate independently or tha can be used as one ginormous layout, lots and lots of operations could happen here, even has an open pit mine, about 4 feet below grade with track down and back up it

oopps , see first picture for open pit mine

you can see that turnout was very good, this one has a lot of track very close to walking paths, and the track is ground level , I hope no one accidently kicked or stepped on a train.

another shot of the layout and the people attending

Shameless picture to attract Rooster and David Maynard.

My wife in the blue, Grandson Eli in Steelers gear and son in law in far background, they are looking for the 15 monkeys and 12 ducks along with a big list of other things to find on this neat RR around the back yard.

Son in Law Chad in baseball cap, Daughter Kim and granddaughter Abbe in background hunting items on the list.

I must say 90% of these layouts were very well constructed and well detailed, 2 were advertised as still under construction, but you could see where they were heading and the work they were doing to get them ready. My thanks to all who open their layouts for us to visit. Looking at the details and all its a big job to get ready for something like this.

#5

I for some reason missed the picture of the open pit mine , here it is

I think I have more pictures on my phone I will see whats there and upload them

#6

That is a big layout Pete. I love the engine house, but the open pit mine is my favorite. That would be neat to model one day. Thanks for taking us along on your journey.