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Order Tracking Information Garden Railroading Primer Articles: All about getting a Garden Railroad up and running wellGarden Train Store: Index to train, track, and other products for Garden Railroading
Large Scale Starter Sets: Begin with a train you'll be proud to runBest Choices for Beginning Garden Railroaders: a short list of things you're most likely to need when starting out
Large Scale Track order FormFamily Garden Trains Archive Articles: Other miscellaneous articles about garden railroading
Large Scale Christmas Trains: Trains with a holiday theme for garden or professional display railroads.Free Large Scale Signs and Graphics: Bring your railroad to life with street signs, business signs, and railroad signs
Garden Railroading Books, Magazines, and Videos: Where to go to learn even more
Collectible Trains and Villages: On30 Trains and accessories designed by Thomas Kinkade and others

Order Tracking Information:
Garden Train Store™ and Big Christmas Trains™

Since the Family Garden Trains(tm) web site was founded in 1999, readers have been asking us where they can get the kinds of trains we discuss in our articles. In October, 2004, we started creating a series of "Buyers' Guides" featuring the kind of products folks were most likely to need when they first started out. By November, 2004, the demand for Christmas Trains was so high that we added the Big Christmas Train(tm) site, which focuses on holiday and display railroads. At any given time, we are now showing something like 200 different carefully-chosen products from about fifteen suppliers, and we've become the closest thing that the Internet has for a "reference book" for several kinds of trains.

Something that took a lot of work was finding suppliers whom we could trust to give our readers excellent service and who would allow us to link directly to product pages on their sites. This way we can show many quality products in a fairly limited space, while giving our readers (when possible) a choice of suppliers to check for availability and pricing. Frankly, I have yet to see anything as useful and convenient as our "check stock" buttons on any other web site. And most readers appreciate not having to spend hours surfing the web just to see what is available, and then having to track down a supplier who has that product in stock.

The "flip side" of this convenience is that when you "check stock" on a supplier's page, I don't have any direct way of tracking where you went. (I suppose I could track it if I used cookies and spyware but I'm not into that sort of thing - another advantage of our sites.) That means that when you order a train from one of our recommended suppliers, I seldom learn about it until after the product has shipped. If you have a question about when a product shipped or anything like that, I will help you if I can, but your first, best bet is to figure out which supplier you ordered the product from and contact them first.

In other words, if you have ordered a product through a link from our sites, and you have a question about shipments, billing, etc. there are two things you can do to help us help you:

  1. To get questions about orders or billing solved in the fastest possible way, try to find the store you ordered, and use their "track order" links or customer service number to get your specific question answered quickly. (I have some example pages from my recommended suppliers below to help you retrace your steps, if necessary.)
  2. To keep us in the loop and to help us know what kind of service you are getting from our suppliers, please use the form at the bottom of this page. Please let us know as much as you can about your order. That way, if you need our help with something, we have the information we need. Also, this kind of feedback helps us keep the list trimmed down to suppliers we trust (and you should probably know that we have removed a few whose customer service did not meet our quality standards).

If you ordered a Hawthorne Village collectable train or village, you can contact the Collectibles Today people. (We've included a sample "Collectibles Today" page at the right to help you remember if this is the site you ordered through.) Their page for checking on orders is http://www.collectiblestoday.com/ct/vieworderstatus.jsp. If you don't think that page is very helpful, you can try their customer service phone # 1-877-268-6638, but you may be on hold for a while.
TrainDiscounts supplies most of the Bachmann and AristoCraft trains and some of the Lionel trains we list. If you recall clicking on a page that looks like the one at the right, you probably ordered your train from TrainDiscounts. Their customer service contact page is at http://www.traindiscounts.com/acbhpusa/help_site/default.cfm?st_id=115&this_help=lv. Their customer service phone # is 1-800-404-4414 Mon-Fri 9a-6p EST.
We also link to Amazon.com for several Bachmann, AristoCraft, and Lionel products. Amazon, in turn, often links to other suppliers, but Amazon reports on shipping information no matter which supplier they use, as long as you go through their store front. An example Amazon product page is shown to the right, in case it helps jog your memory. If you bought a product through Amazon, go to the page you used to order the product, look at the lower left corner for a box labeled "Where's My Stuff?" and click on the words "recent orders."
Boscov's is a department store that sold a few Bachmann Large Scale trains in November of 2006. If you bought a train from Boscov's, click on the words "Great Customer Service" on the lower left part of the page, or call 1-800-284-8155.


Other Lionel® Suppliers

Lionel sells its products through many other channels, including mail-order department stores. Several of these carry only a few trains, but we link to them to give you more chances to find the products you want. If you have ordered a Lionel train, and you didn't get it from TrainDiscounts or Amazon.com, click on the link below to see the page of suppliers we currently list for Lionel trains.

Click Here for Additional Lionel Order Tracking Information

Please Keep Us in the Loop

Please use the form below to let us know how else we can help. The only information we have to have is your name, your e-mail address, and as much as you can tell us about the product(s) you ordered. Of course, if you want to occasionally receive e-mail announcements or "US mail" garden train product catalogs in the mail, add your mailing address to the following form. We will not sell or give this information to anyone else, but if a manufacturer gives us materials to send out to our readers, we will forward them to you.

Again, please contact us with any questions about this, and feel free to add any comments in the comment box below.

Thanks, and happy railroading,

Paul Race

Family Garden Trains(tm)

Garden Train Store(tm)

Big Christmas Trains(tm)


Your Name

Your email address
Your email address again, just to be sure

What Kind of Product Did you Order? (Optional, check all that apply)
AristoCraft
Bachmann
Large
Scale
Bachmann
On30
Lionel
Large
Scale
Lionel O
Gauge
(three-rail
track)
Hawthorne
Village
(Collectibles)
O-Scale
Accessories
Other
(describe
below)

Describe "Other"

Please enter as much information you have about your order, including which page you ordered it from (if you can remember, your customer number (if any), the product ID (if you know it), and about when you placed your order. The more information you can give us, the faster we can track things down.

Street Number and Street Name (Optional)

Your City or Town (Optional)
Your State (Optional)
Your Zip Code (Optional)

Would you like to receive e-mail announcements when new articles or special announcements about Garden Railroads are available?
Yes
No
Would you like to receive e-mail announcements when new articles or special announcements about Christmas Trains or Holiday Villages become available?
Yes
No
Would you like to receive (by US Mail) any Garden Railroading-related product catalogs that become available?
Yes
No

Would you like to receive (by US Mail) any Christmas Train or Holiday Village-related product catalogs that become available?
Yes
No

What kinds of trains or other modeling interests are especially interesting to you?

Please Enter Any Other Comments or Questions


To return to the Family Garden Trains Home Page, click here.

Home
Reading Index Pages
Buyer's Guide Pages
Return to Home page Garden Railroading Primer Articles: All about getting a Garden Railroad up and running well
Family Garden Trains Archive Articles: Other miscellaneous articles about garden railroading
Garden Train Store: Index to train, track, and other products for Garden RailroadingBig Christmas Trains: Directory of Large Scale and O Scale trains with holiday themes
O Scale (Indoor) Display Trains, Includes Collectible Trains and Thomas Kinkade Trains

Note: Family Garden Trains(tm), Garden Train Store(tm), and Big Christmas Trains(tm) are trademarks of Breakthrough Communications(tm) (www.btcomm.com). All information, data, text, and illustrations on this web site are Copyright (c) 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 by Paul D. Race. Reuse or republication without prior written permission is specifically forbidden.

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