Set on a golf course in Florida, Lloyd Crouthamel's garden railroad receives plenty of visitors and an occasional errant golf ball. Complete with villages, waterfalls, bridges (figure A) and trestles, golfers often stop to admire Lloyd's railroad, unaware that everything on the layout has been scratch-built. Even the track and the car that cleans the track are products of Lloyd's workshop.
"Since I was a kid," explains Lloyd, "I've always been into woodworking. I was in a machine shop for 43 years, and I always enjoyed making things. I was into HO-gauge trains for years, and photography, but you either do one thing well or a lot of things lousy. So, I got out of all of them and into garden railroading." All of the scale-model structures on Lloyd's layouts are cut from cedar. He has experimented with a foam building, but covered it in cedar. "You can use preservative wood, which is cheaper, but it just doesn't look as good as cedar (figure B)," Lloyd explains. "I even made all my passenger cars, cut up all the wood myself and put in a potbelly stove. The cars are wired for illumination, and the doors on the cars work. I used a piece of cloth as the hinges and it holds up well in the weather. Lloyd built a track-cleaning car (figure C) for his layout. Without the cleaner, residue builds up on the track and makes the electrical contact between the engine and rails more difficult. "We found two surplus DC motors and mounted them to a flat car," Lloyd explains. "The motors drive two pads with steel wool that scourer the tracks as the car is pulled by one of my locomotives. The idea is to get the rails down to clean brass."A native of Pennsylvania, Lloyd runs a Pennsylvania Railroad diesel on his layout, but has not based his layout on any particular road. "No," says Lloyd, "it's just based on my own imagination really. It's all about having fun and keeping my hand in woodworking. It's a wonderful hobby filled with great people who help each other with their layouts. The best way to enjoy the hobby is to belong to a club where you can find advice and friendship."
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