Whistle, Music Whistle, Music Ancr: Tracks Ahead.

Brought to you by Kalmbach Publishing Company, producers of an online source for rail-related information, where you can discover model trains, toy trains, garden trains and even real trains.

(Horn) The Model Railroad Division of the Hobby Manufacturer's Association.

Helping hobbyists design and build their own miniature railroad empires inside or outside, big or small.

(Whistle) Music Spencer: Hi, I'm Spencer Christian.

On this episode of Tracks Ahead, we'll go into the Carpathian Mountains in western Romania to rediscover a narrow gauge line that is undergoing some clandestine restoration.

We'll visit with an artist and modeler whose books have become a must for model railroad enthusiasts, and we'll go to Florida, where a company can build the model railroad of your dreams.

Imagine that you are an award winning chef with a highly successful restaurant.

And that you had a passion for trains.

Now, suppose you had a backyard the size of a football field?

Let's visit a man whose imagination has become reality, and whose desire to think big, has resulted in a monumental layout.

Ancr: Dennis Sirrine is a man with a passion.

And for the last two years that passion has been all consuming.

He's building a dream he calls the Palo Verde and Southwestern Railroad in suburban Phoenix, Arizona.

This magnificent "G" gauge garden layout meanders over 36,000 square feet of Dennis' property.

And, while there is still much work to be done, the dream is finally beginning to take shape.

When completed, The Palo Verde and Southwestern Railroad will be one of the three largest layouts in the United States with a level of realism and detail unsurpassed anywhere.

Dennis: We designed the layout to have two main lines, about 2000 ft. each one.

We also have a logging section, a mining section, we're going to have two towns and its going to go for a long way around this property.

Mostly we're using USA engines, modern SD40s, SD 45s, Mac 8s, Mac 9s, with some steam but I'm mostly a diesel kind of a guy.

The mining operation is going be up in the mountains, is going have a coal tipple, and we're going be able to go get the cars, and bring them down to a lake and unload them on a dock.

The lumbering is going be very similar to the mining.

We're going be up in the mountains.

We'll have Shays, Heislers, Climax's.

They'll go up on switchbacks up to the logging area.

They'll pull the logs down in log cars, come down to the mill and they'll be milled there on the water.

The interesting aspect of this layout is I think that we have a building that we made especially for this layout.

It'll house 10 to 12 engineers, they'll run the layout.

We're able to stock all the trains in the building.

We also have a nine track staging yard where we can put all the trains.where we can stage them and we can bring them out into the layout.

To run it prototypically would be 10 to 12 with a dispatcher.

And because of the main lines, logging, I have two yards and the mining operation, it will take at least 12 people to do that.

Ancr: So, just what was it that motivated Dennis to take on this monumental project?

Dennis: I used to be a builder for 20 years and I was building large custom homes, and I thought for a little trick it would be nice to put G scale trains at door level height and run them through several rooms.

I did it on the first home, it sold like hotcakes, and so I started doing it from then on, and just fell in love with G scale.

It's an expensive hobby.

I finally got some money.

I got some land and I decided to do a nice G scale layout here in my home.

I got the layout out of several magazines and rough sketched it on a piece of paper.

I'm using four main lines.

I'm using a mining town.

I'm using a regular town.

I'm putting it all together and we're dealing with about 2000 lineal feet of mainline.

Ancr: When the project began, Dennis never imagined just how expensive and time consuming it would become.

Dennis: I have a lot of money invested in this thing.

Well over a half a million dollars in just the aspect out here alone, not counting the rolling stock engines and passenger cars.

This is an immense project.

I think I bit off more than I can chew.

It's taken a lot of time.

I feel like I'm building a real railroad.

It should have been finished two months ago.

Probably another year or so to get this thing to where it should be exactly, prototypically correct, running like a top.

The biggest challenge to this construction was getting the track right.

I listened to what I thought was an expert years ago who told me to solder the track between sections.

When I did that I found out the track changed characteristics and got smaller, so that when we put all this together we were having derailments at the junction of track.

So we had to rip all the track out, we had to cut off those sections that were soldered, reinstall the track and then go that way.

Right now we have it on concrete roadbed with a. it's kind of like a carpet padding that's made special for railroads, it's kind of a sub-base.

And then we put the track down and we screw every two feet, screws into the track to hold it to the roadbed.

The landscaping's been a challenge.

We've had to do the infrastructure of all the flowers, planter boxes.

This is all irrigated land around the railroad.

Plus we've had a real struggle with the lake and streams.

Every time we get to a point where we want to concrete the liners, its rained, we've had storms.

We've had to rip it out twice now and put it back together.

So we've had some challenges there trying to get this landscaping up to speed.

Ancr: After two years of intense labor, it's hard to imagine there's still more to be done.

Dennis: We are probably 5/8 of the way finished at this stage of the game.

All of the track is down, the wiring is complete, the building is complete.

We have to finish our mountain scenes.

We have to finish some of the landscaping around the track areas.

And then, when we get that done, we should be pretty close to being completed.

This is unique because it is so huge.

It's going take garden railroading to the next step which is a cross between realism and the actual landscaping of flowers which will be really unique in the US because nobody is really doing that.

Ancr: Just building the rock scenery for the layout has been a major piece of this complex puzzle.

Bruce Ambrose is Dennis' rock scenery expert on the project.

Bruce: My company is Canyon Creations.

I've been building artificial rock here in the Phoenix area for about six or seven years.

Mainly for water features, landscape architecture.

that kind of thing.

The rocks themselves are made out of a lightweight concrete.

They're made in a mold, out of a cast mold made from a real rock, so I have real rock texture.

And we basically just bring these rock panels to the job site, cut them, break them into whatever sizes and shapes we're looking for, and start back filling with cement.

The panels themselves are made out of a lightweight pumice.

That's just to allow us to move them around easy, cut them easily so we can ship them around and work with them easily.

The actual, the backing to it is all concrete re-enforced with rebar.

The finished color that goes on the rocks, once the rock itself is all built it's still flat gray like this, it doesn't have any real color to it.

So we come back in with basically latex paints and do a kind of a staining process.

They're watered down, and it takes 5 or 6 coats of different colors to bring them up to.

to give them some life, give them some depth.

Ancr: And what advice does Dennis have for those who would follow in his footsteps?

Dennis: If I was going do this over again I probably would have broken it up into smaller sections.

It's been almost two years and I haven't run trains until about a month ago.

You really want to start running trains as soon as possible.

So I should have broken it up into smaller segments, started running trains, and then added to it as I went along.

It would have been a lot more enjoyable insteadf waiting two years to start running my trains.

Ancr: And, when all this is completed, what will visitors enjoy most about it?

Dennis: I think they're going to enjoy the trains running in long distances, long trains, prototypical situations.

They're going really enjoy this.

It's a really great layout.

Ancr: Our hats are off to Dennis Sirrine and his Palo Verde and Southwestern Railroad .

His dedication and persistence are inspiring to any of us who ever had a dream.

Spencer: Dennis plans to use his control house to display his collection of Lionel trains.

It's always satisfying when you get to the point in life when you realize there's one thing that you can now do very well.

And, it's pretty darn impressive, when you have the opportunity to meet someone that does not just one, or two, but three things.and he does them all well.

Let's head out to New York State and meet a gentleman who's a modeler, a photographer, and an author.

Ancr: In the world of model railroading Lou Sassi is somewhat of a Renaissance man.

He does almost everything, and he does it all well.

Lou is a photographer who has taken pictures of a variety of layouts for modeling magazines.

He's an author of a number of how-to books for model railroad enthusiasts.

And, he is a long time modeler himself.

Sassi: Well, it all started in the late 40's when my father gave my brother and I a Lionel train set for Christmas.

And for about 8 or 9 years I played with the Lionel set and added to it over the years until around 1958, I believe it was December of 58, I picked up an issue of Model Railroader Magazine.

And in that issue I saw some scale model HO trains that really impressed me, the photographs and the realism of the models.

So I changed over to HO after that, and I've been in that scale ever since.

I started shooting photographs back in the late 70's.

The first photographs I took of a model railroad were actually on a diorama that I had here at the house.

And I won a Dremel Kitbashing award for.

Shortly after that in the early 80's, I started doing photo shoots for Model Railroader and it just kinda steam rolled after I first started with a photo shoot or two, to the point where I was freelancing for them on a regular basis, shooting many model railroads all over the country.

Well, I started doing books back in the early 90's and I've done two so far.

One on a HO layout that grows, and another on scenery for model railroads.

And I'm presently working on another edition which will be on super detailing a scene for model railroads.

Ancr: As you can clearly see, Lou's talent and expertise are evident.

Developed over many years.

Lou Sassi has been working on his own layout for more than a quarter of a century.

It is, and always has been, a work in progress.

And what a work it is.

So realistic that it pulls you back into it's 1950's time frame.

His HO scale west Hoosic Division runs between Massachusetts and Vermont.

It's a bridge line owned and operated by the prototype Boston and Maine Railroad in northwestern Massachusetts and southeastern New York.

It's extended to Bennington, Vermont where it interchanges with another popular New England railroad, the Rutland.

Lou's layout evolved as his expertise grew.

It became more and more realistic.

Gone were the days of freewheeling and freelancing, where his primary goal was to loosely capture the feel of New England railroading.

Now, it's a replica of reality.

It has symmetry.

It flows.

Sassi: By focusing on a particular prototype you have a family appearance to the locomotives.

You can do research and find out what specific cars ran on the railroad.

You can research the structures around the railroad, the scenery around the railroad.

And you can base the model on reality.

A few of the favorite features or locations on the layout, there's a couple of them in particular are the large trestle at Saw Hill.

And I think that's a favorite because it took me so long to build the thing and there's so much involved in the construction of it.

There's 3 thousand nut bolt washer castings on the trestle.

Well, the Hoosac Tunnel West Portal area is one of my favorite spots because it was a model that was given to me by a group of modelers in Massachusetts who actually made a model of the west portal of the real Hoosac Tunnel.

And the other version of that one is on display at the Harris Park Museum in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Back in 1996 when there was a commercial video done on the layout, I finished all of the scenery.

And since that time I've added a closing loop, an unsceniced closing loop.

This allows me to run through trains.

In the future actually I'm just planning on adding a few more buildings, scratchbuilt structures to the layout, and just operating it on a regular basis.

Ancr: Lou's books usually offer advice on simple techniques you can use to make realistic scenery for a layout of any size or scale.

They offer step by step instructions for building a complete layout.

It's pretty obvious he knows what he's writing about.

But some of his most valuable advice is basic.

Be willing to accept help from friends.

And always remember to enjoy what your doing.

Sassi: I know a lot of modelers who take a great deal of pride in knowing that the railroad or model railroad is all of their work; they've done everything.

Myself, I get a great deal of pride in knowing that I've had a lot of talented people, friend's that I've made over the years through my photography work with Kalmbach, people I've met in the hobby.

And that by making my layout kind of a showcase for not only my work but their work brings me a great deal of satisfaction and pride.

For people getting into the hobby, I would say that my feelings are that you should probably bear in mind that it is a hobby, and as such it is something that you should enjoy.

No matter what you do, enjoy it, have a good time, use it as a source of relaxation, and don't take it or yourself to seriously, and I think you'll have a lot of fun.

Ancr: Lou Sassi is testament to both the possibilities, and the pleasures that come with knowing how to do something well.

And he's proof that the route to excellence can be full of enjoyable experiences.

Spencer: Lou's attention to detail is remarkable, and it is amazing how little items can really make a scene come to life.

Some people get great pleasure out of the long hours and many years they spend building their model railroad layouts.

And then, there are some people who get their satisfaction out of simply enjoying the beautiful dream layout that someone else built for them!

In a moment, we'll check out a Florida company that, for a price, can turn any model railroader's fantasy, into reality.

First, the beautiful Carpathian Mountains are found along the northern border of Romania.

The deep valleys and steep hillsides have slowed progress.

And it's there that you can still find remnants of old railroads, which were the primary means of transportation until late in the twentieth century.

Lets meet a man whose personal mission is to the keep railroad history alive in the region Ancr: In western Romania, just inside the Carpathian mountain range, you'll find a railroad.

And it isn't just any railroad.

Until recently, this narrow gauge line was in service as the only modern means of transportation into the deep mountain valleys.

In addition to bringing supplies and passenger service to the remote areas, the line also served to haul minerals and gold between the western town of Turda, and the eastern mining town of Abrund.

Built in the early 1900s, it faithfully carried goods and passengers along it's 98 kilometers and for almost one hundred years.

But highways were built, and the line became unprofitable.

All has not been lost for this railroad.

George Hocevar, a Swiss businessman, owns a local company that refurbishes scrapped railroad cars and mining equipment.

He sees a future for this rail line.

George: Because I'm a very big railway enthusiast, for me it was very sad to see how old narrow gauge railway lines in Romania slowly were closed and damaged.

So I can tell you in '89, before the revolution in Romania, there were 2000 kilometers of railway lines and more than 400 kilometers of state railway lines for freight and passenger transport.

And in '97, '98, almost all of these lines were closed.

And for me, it was a passion to make something that would not be lifted from all these lines.

In our business, we can make some financing for some of these lines.

We want to show the Romanian government that some lines are still existing and that it is still possible to run trains on them.

And this line, Campen Abrund, is a very beautiful line in a very beautiful area and we wanted to make some example here.

Ancr: George considers himself a preservationist with a fondness for narrow gauge railroading.

He has purchased his own engine and his own railroad cars in an attempt to recreate the heyday of the line and he feels strongly about the need for preservation.

George: Forty kilometers from here there is our factory with 270 employees and we build and rebuild narrow gauge wagons there and it is neighborship.

Every time when we have business in Cluj we are passing by these lines, and it is very pity that we have seen that it is damaged and so we started to make something here.

Ancr: But his efforts have not been without obstacles.

George: So the biggest problem on this line and on all the other lines on which we are working is that some people are stealing all materials.

So if you look here on this line, in Freemon, they were stealing for three kilometers, all nails, all screws, and it was necessary to start again.

So last year in August we repaired these twelve kilometers completely, and now it was necessary to work again for four weeks to replace the material.

So in four weeks our staff was putting more than 8,000 nails to rebuild the line here.

And it won't be the same quality that it was before because the sleepers are in very bad condition because before it was fixed with screws and now it is only an improvisation.

Ancr: While the Romanian government still technically owns the line and right of way, all the villages hope that the line will be restored and brought back to life.

Liviu Ardeleanu: The city of Abrund is very glad to have this train and when we had these activities last year, I made many publicity calls to the politicians.

I am very glad of this program because it is very good good for the area to have a tourism attraction for the people who can come in this valley.

Ancr: So George continues his battle to keep a bit of history from disappearing.

Not only is the railroad a fledgling tourist attraction, it is a historical link to the past.

Music Ancr: Look inside this building in North Miami Beach, Florida and you will see, step by painstaking step, the construction of a new "standard of excellence."

Shop Noise The company is called SMARTT.

It stands for Scale Models, Arts & Technologies.

If it is a three dimensional miniature you want, they can build it.

Any thing.

Any scale.

The architects, engineers and artists who work here have nearly a century of combined experience in all types of model making.

They build architectural models to help builders and city planners.

Motion picture quality display models.

And, museum quality model railroad layouts.

The typical customer is well-to-do, and wants the best.

Michael: Originally we started with older gentlemen who were train enthusiasts their entire lives, harbored the dream to have a layout, never really had the opportunity.

They are either retired or in semi-retirement, have more disposable income, their kids are grown, all their basic responsibilities in life have been discharged, and now they want to have a little fun.

The don't have their own personal time or inclination or skills to actually build the project so they come to us.

The three basic guidelines in my philosophy in doing this are it's got to look absolutely beautiful, it's got to perform flawlessly, and it's got to relatively easy to use.

This is no doubt a luxury item.

I would say, that to be perfectly candid, it is very rare that we can do a job for under six figures.

Essentially when we start one of these projects, we start off with a design, much of the information is supplied by the client through a questionnaire that we have.

We come up with a track plan that generally looks something like this.

Once that's approved in plan form, we will also show it in elevation form, which would be something like this, or like this, we're showing the different elevations.

We'll also provide a three dimension rendered look, something like that.

And then once we get the go ahead, we do the mechanical engineering.

Ancr: It's kind of like building a house.

First there's desire, and that's followed by design and construction.

The promise is that you will always be in control, of what's being built, and how much you're spending.

The process can take many months.

The layout is built in modules, which are then disassembled, loaded on a semi-truck, and reassembled in your home like a jigsaw puzzle, by a crew that flies in to do the work.

The guarantee is that you will be incredibly satisfied.

Even if what you want is a non-traditional layout suspended from the ceiling of your condo, with hundreds of feet of track running through two rooms and a hallway, with an elevator that delivers the trains to the track.

You want it.

you got it.

Jeff: I wanted to have the use of a long space for the trains to travel throughout like a large home, but didn't have the large home to do it, so this was the best way to do it, up off the ceiling and up against the wall.

Ancr: A SMARTT built layout can transcend time.

It's your memories of the past, and just what you want for the present.

It is exactly what you want it to be.

Michael: Right now I'm standing at the centerpiece of Mr. Ilyinski's layout, the late Paul Ilyinski, he was a train lover his entire life.

And this Lionel O gauge layout was the culmination of numerous layouts he had throughout his lifetime..

This is the centerpiece, it's a bilevel six track swing bridge that allows you to get in and out of the layout.

Dmitri: I think he loved the color of the trees, the fall foliage, which reminded him of Cincinnati.

He loved the engine house, he loved the time period.

He loved that 1950's, early 1960's period of the layout.

And one of the things he loved to do with the layout was to photograph it.

He was a photographer throughout his life, and he spent a lot of time playing with his new digital cameras and photographing the different scenes, different vignettes.

He loved it.

Ancr: So there is a place in Florida where dreams come true.

Step by step.

Piece by beautiful piece.

Spencer: George hopes that tourism will help keep the line from being destroyed once Romania is in the European Union.

That's all for this episode.

Please join us for the next, Tracks Ahead.

Music Ancr: Tracks Ahead.

Brought to you by Kalmbach Publishing Company, bringing you Model Railroader magazine every month for over 70 years.

And Classic Toy Trains, the magazine for operators and collectors of toy trains from yesteryear and today.

Walthers, manufacturer and supplier of model railroading products; serving the hobby since 1932.

The Model Railroad Division of the Hobby Manufacturers Association.

Helping hobbyists design and build their own miniature railroad empires inside or outside, big or small.

(Whistle) Music Music