Train Fancier Builds Own Rail Yard

A few years back Alan Bledsoe admired a working model train in a store window and decided it would look perfect under his Christmas tree.

Later, he bought another train set, and then another, and another and another and. . . .

Bledsoe, 41, became so infatuated with model locomotives and cars that he even kept a train set he bought for his younger brother.

Soon trains were running throughout the house and even through a passageway he cut through the wall and out to the patio and back.

Now the perimeters of the back yard at his Yorba Linda home have been transformed into a landscaped train thoroughfare with its own depot.

The moving steam locomotive and cars that make up the trains, some stretching 30 feet, look and sound like the real thing, complete with the huffing and chuffing and the clickity clack from the iron wheels.

The train also blares out its impending arrival with blasts from a steam horn.

“I just couldn’t stop buying them,” said Bledsoe, who works for his father, an Anaheim cement contractor. “It slowly kept getting bigger and bigger until it took over the inside of the house.”

So Bledsoe had no alternative.

He took the G gauge model trains outside. When they are not in use he stores them in a caboose he built. It is 18 feet long and 12 feet high.

“Half of it is a dollhouse and the other half is for the trains,” he said. “I made a deal with my three daughters that if I could take down their dollhouse in the back yard they could use half of the caboose.”

The caboose also houses the controls for the eight locomotives and 300 cars that make up his sizable train inventory.

He has other train sets, including the first he ever bought, but they are kept on display shelves in his house.

“Actually, I’ve always liked real trains, and now I like these, and I wish I could explain why,” said Bledsoe, as he watched his train chug through his self-built forest and across his rivers and bridges.

“Maybe it’s the little boy in me,” he theorized.

Maybe so, and that feeling might account for the estimated 330 other rail fanciers who have joined the Los Angeles Garden Railway Society that Bledsoe helped start less than three years ago.

Most of the members from Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside counties share a growing interest in back-yard railroading, says Bledsoe, who plans to enlarge his own setup.

It also solves the problem of a busy life that prevents the Bledsoe family from getting away.

“Having this for a hobby at the house works out well for the whole family,” he said.

Bledsoe and other members of the train society, who pay a $40 yearly fee, often hold open house to show off their innovative setups.

And while most of the members are in their 20s, many are retired people, who usually have the nicest layouts since they have more time to devote to them. “Lots of people are getting a lot of joy out of landscaping their yards with trees, lakes, houses, miniature people, animals and trains,” he said. “It’s becoming very popular.”