108 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM TRAIN CLUB Richard found his way to BAGRS after retiring from dentistry. “Pretty much any hobby, you should join a club,” he holds. “There is a wealth of information within any club. You don’t have to discover how the wheel works. It’s already been discovered. Just ask.” Because of their multifaceted attributes, garden railroads can be a massive undertaking for anyone trying to build on their own. “You need to be a landscaper. You need to be a planner. You need to be a plumber. You need to be an electrician,” explains Richard. The persistence and perspiration required for his own pièce de résistance—from the boulders stacked into proud peaks to the teeny-tiny lettering painstakingly hand-painted on the storefronts— is almost unfathomable. “It’s time-consuming. It takes hard work and imagination. Not everybody has each of those qualities,” he points out. But each member has their own expertise to lend. In fact, Richard credits his koi pond and waterfall to another’s handy skill set. “There’s probably a thousand feet of plumbing out here,” he surmises. Some members specialize in electronics, while others break out lathes, drills and welders to build locomotives from scratch. Richard is a bit of a bridge guy. His most elaborate build, an almost ninefoot model of Hell’s Gate Bridge in New York City with intricate stone abutments, took him 1,000 hours of labor to complete. On the far side of the garden resides a replica of the famous cantilever bridge featured in the 1957 war film The Bridge on the River Kwai (which Richard designed after close analysis of the movie’s promo poster). He’s also quite the garden guru. Richard’s plant-forward track shows off his membership in another organization: the Kusamura Bonsai Club. Around all aboard the garden railway
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