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The New Boston and Donnels Creek Railroad was built and is maintained by Paul Race, editor and principal author for the "Family Garden Trains" site, an online reference for garden railroaders and people who are thinking about being garden railroaders.
Note: I have put this site up to encourage other "ordinary" folks to take the plunge into Garden Railroading. I'm no carpenter, but I know how to move rocks and follow simple instructions. Basically, if I can do it, you can do it. If you spend some time on the site, you'll realize that I started with a very bare garden and a loop of track around a store-bought pond, and just kept adding plants and ideas until I got something fun to watch and operate in the back yard.
The first iteration was a loop of track on a bed of mulch in the side yard in the spring of 1998. But ground wasn't actually was broken until the summer of 1998, after the loss of two large trees opened up a space in the yard we didn't even "know we had."
I started with the pond, since I figured that it would be easier to build a railroad over a pond, than a pond under a railroad. The track wasn't really laid until it was too cold to play with the trains much.
Extensions and additions grew slowly, as did groundcovers at first. Now you'd swear I had a gift for this sort of thing, but in 1999, it looked like I was modeling the Mohave Desert. Along the way, I've made many mistakes that you won't have to make, and learned some relatively simple approaches that will make your life simpler and save you money besides. So take a tour of the past, present, and maybe future of my railroad. And when you tire of me talking about my well-planned projects that failed and my accidents that succeded, you can go back to the Family Garden Trains site to see information of a less personal nature.
Note for 2006: You may have noticed that I don't update this site as much as I do my Primer pages. In fact, I receive so many inquiries that I don't even work on my railroad as much as I do on the "how to" articles. Most years, it's all I can do to get my track cleared, my gardens weeded, most of my buildings out, and my trains running. That doesn't mean that we don't enjoy our garden railroad; but it does mean that not many new things have been added for a while. That said, a batch of photographs from our last open house (in 2003, can you believe it?) just came to light, so I decided to put those online. In the meantime, I thought it would be a good time to go back to the other pages and make the appearance, contents, and crosslinks more consistent. In other words, only a fraction of the New Boston and Donnels Creek pages are actually new, many of them will look new to previous visitors. Many of them also contain new information, such as new links, new photos, and notes on what has changed between the year the photos were first taken and 2006. So take a peak, even if you've been here before. Also, if you're interested in seeing the New Boston and Donnels Creek (which is near Donnelsville, in Southwest Ohio), sign up for our mailing list and express an interest. You may also ask any questions you'd like and we'll try to get back to you.
Best of luck; enjoy your look around,
Paul
About the New Boston and Donnels Creek (Overview)
In the meantime, you poke around the site, enjoy yourself and imagine what you could do with a shovel and some rocks yourself if you had half a chance. And leave me a note if something gives you an idea. Also, if you're heading toward the Dayton/Springfield Ohio area, and you want to see a beginning garden railroad that will make you feel better about your attempts, drop me a line.
P.S. In case you wondered, the New Boston and Donnels Creek railroad is named after a pioneer village that used to be here and a creek that I used to wade in, which was named after one of the founders of Donnelsville, Ohio, a tiny hamlet just west of Springfield on Route 40. For a look at the area's history, click here
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Note: Family Garden Trains(tm) and Big Christmas Trains(tm) are trademarks of Breakthrough Communications (www.btcomm.com). All information, data, text, and illustrations on this web site are
Copyright (c) 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 by Paul D. Race.
Reuse or republication without prior written permission is specifically
forbidden.
For more information, please contact me