Spectacularly going nowhere around the garden

John Carmichael has a serious avocation.

Hidden behind a bit of leafy screen in his front yard is evidence of his devotion to craft. There sits a garden train. It sounds prosaic enough, but one peek and the viewer will be amazed at the technology, the engineering, the electronics, the artistry and the mechanics of it all.

Carmichael’s garden train diorama is a true STEAM project.

“Every single one of these ties and stays are handmade,” said Chuck Cook, president of the Tucson Garden Railway Society.

“And designed,” added Carmichael. “Each one is different. Each one is made for the location.”

This is no small project, considering there are about 200 trestles.

“If you put all the pieces together, that’s about 4 linear miles of wood,” Carmichael said.

To it they add Victorian-era figures who, though stationary, seem busy. Then there’s the working funicular railway, and the spectacular garden that surrounds the entire layout.

The public can check out these masterpieces during Rails in the Garden 2023 on Saturday, March 11, and Sunday, March 12. It’s a nine-stop, self-guided, self-paced tour of members’ layouts, most of which are outdoors.

The train set is G-gauge, or 1:24 scale. It’s fairly large for those who are accustomed to the household-sized HO scale model trains, and was actually designed for garden railways.

Before he retired, Carmichael spent 25 years in the “retail and wholesale tropical foliage industry,” he said, which explains the garden.

“Most people who do the layouts pick a spot in their yard, and they say, ‘Oh, I want a figure 8 or a circle,’ and they build it,” Cook said. “This one, John had an aerial shot of the yard and put all this in the cactus that was already here.”

Carmichael added, “Most people just take everything out of their yard, and it’s a totally blank canvas. I didn’t want to rip out our plants. The plants were really important to me, so we had to find a design that would work around the existing plants.”

Carmichael took great care in designing around what was there.

“Rather than fight the trees and fight the plants, we wanted to bring them into the whole show,” he said. “We wanted the little people to live with the plants, so all over you’ll see how they adapted to living with plants.”

Although miniature, the Swiss Family Robinson-type treehouse, among other structures, prove his point. There’s even a dinosaur dig. Carmichael built and designed everything himself.

He didn’t do it alone, however. He had help from his partner, Philip Pappas, who did quite a bit of the lugging and toting.

“He was my boulder guy, my landscaper helper,” Carmichael said.

Pappas said with a laugh that he had to go to work in his office during the week to get a break from the weekend labor.

Tucson Garden Railway Society members are concerned about the next generation, as they’re aging.

“This isn’t going to last long because we’re all getting old,” Carmichael said. “We’ve lost some of our best members this year. Some of our best companies are going out of business because of COVID supply chain problems. We’re disappearing, so if you want to see some of these things, you better see them in the next few years because they’ll be gone.”

That is, of course, unless they can interest younger people in the hobby. All three men see great value in having garden railroads.

“The good thing about garden railroading is it’s artistic,” Cook said. “It’s hands-on, it’s outdoors, it’s electrical. You have to learn set up. There’s a lot of things that are good hands-on things that I hope the kids will pick up.”

“They can learn everything,” Carmichael added. “It’s so great for kids.”

The outdoor layout has also united the neighborhood.

“The other cool thing about that is we’ve developed a neighborhood feel,” Pappas said. “Every neighbor knows us. They bring their grandchildren over. They stop by, so we’ve really developed a neighborhood mentality because of this.”

Rails in the Garden 2023, a self-guided tour of members’ model train layouts

WHEN: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, March 11, and Sunday, March 12

WHERE: Locations around Tucson

COST: Free; monetary donations requested for Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona and Tucson Garden Railway Society

INFO: tucsongrs.org

This article appears in Mar 9-15, 2023.