Finally uncovered a way you can mix your wife’s love of weeding and your love of toy trains, huh? As the young up and comers say these days, g scale is definitely the bomb! You get to have fun in the sun while planning your own personal model locomotive empire. Now it’s just a problem of how to do it? Your backyard will have a big say in the type of design you go with. Here are some tips.

Use the topography of your yard to inform the choices you make in terms of circuit design choice:  One of the best decisions you can make is to use the topography of your yard as one of the major factors in deciding the type of train and the design of your g scale model railroad designs.  If you live in the Arizona desert and your backyard is a rock garden, consider choosing a type of train and track that was common in the American Southwest like the Sante Fe type trains that are widely available. If your yard is packed with greenery you’ll have fun dreaming up ways that you can snake your track through it.  The topographical idiosyncrasies of your back yard are the main limit to your g scale model railroad layouts. Try to harness climate and terrain to aid your track plans.

Play peek-a-boo with your train plan:  One of the best ways of maximizing interest to our g scale model railroad layouts is to use the hedges and plants of our back yards to enhance the visual enjoyment of our track plan.

Play peek-a-boo with the viewer by curling the train into the natural features of the yard. The lazy way is to run your track through a bush, but if you’re really ambitious you might build a rocky pass or sharp  gorge right in your back yard.  There is something really wonderful too about seeing the g scale locomotive make its way obscurely through the dark shadows behind a row of bushes.

Work with the major landmarks of your yard:  If you have a completely empty yard then this is not a consideration, but since most of us have things other than trains and grass in your back yards, your best bet is to take these backyard landmarks and work with them. Got statues, let them play a role in your layout. Little stone dwarves around a pool featuring a transom with your locomotive tracks can really make for a hypnotizing experience. Use it.

Add artificial features to your backyard layout:  Finally, to really develop the full reality of our g scale model railroad layouts we are well served by adding features like road crossings and trestle bridges to make our model train worlds as realistic and detailed as possible.  The planning, building and decoration of these structures and features can be one of the most joyous and rewarding aspects of a model railroad.  It is much more rewarding to spend in rainy Sunday afternoon detailing and coloring a model train whistle stop than watching reruns of I Love Lucy.

G scale toy trains are so in demand right now, you shouldn’t be surprised if you friends are willing to shell out cold hard cash to come over and see your design.  But the best reason to take part in this great hobby is that it is just good old fashioned fun!

Here is more information on G Scale Model Trains. Here is a website with a free mini-course dedicated to Model Trains.