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Friends & Neighbors: Meet Ted Yarbrough
Think getting stopped in your car by a train is a pain? Do you spew colorful words when you see the flashing red lights and bars coming down?
For Ted Yarbrough there’s nothing better.
Yarbrough has loved trains from an early age. As a youngster in Carrollton, he and his next door neighbor would walk approximately half a mile down the road just to watch them pass. At home he spent hours playing with his American Flyer train — lost in an imaginary world of big diesel engines, depots and railroad cars.
When he was 8, Yarbrough and his family moved to Murray County. There he could indulge his love for trains to his heart’s content at one of the many area railroad crossings. As an adult his interest evolved into building small-scale model trains when the one he wanted wasn’t available for purchase.
“I wanted an L&N; train (now CSX) because that was what was here locally,” Yarbrough said. “But you couldn’t find them anywhere.”
Over time he built 15 engines and approximately 50 cars, often dismantling them to repaint and redo according to whim. Eventually age caught up with him, however, and rendered him unable to see the tiny parts. Yarbrough sold all the models and in 1989 decided it was finally time to get serious, buying his first large scale engine with a separate set of cars to go with it.
But he wasn’t done.
“I made a train room in the house but I realized you couldn’t go big, so I moved it outside in 1992,” said Yarbrough. “I had read about garden railroading in magazines. I also joined the Georgia Garden Railway Society and started going to national conventions.”
Garden railroading consists of building a railroad layout to scale complete with buildings and people, all around a variety of flowers and sometimes water. Layouts range from the simple to the extravagant.
Yarbrough’s first display featured one tunnel, one bridge, a small town and 150 feet of track.
“I brought in a load of landscape timbers and a load of dirt,” he said. “I was like a kid in a sandbox. It took about six months to complete.”
These days Yarbrough’s buildings look authentic, but back then there wasn’t anything available but plastic kits similar to models. He prefers to build his piece by piece or find them via mail order.
“Everyone pretty much had the same stuff,” he said. “I wanted something different from what everyone else had.”
In one display sits a replica of Prater’s Mill which he found on eBay. However, it didn’t start out as such.
“I bought it from a man in Arizona,” said Yarbrough. “He asked me how I wanted it painted and I told him red. Then he asked me what I wanted written on it and I told him Prater’s Mill. Turns out the man’s daughter lives in Ringgold and he had been to Prater’s Mill.”
Currently Yarbrough boasts three layouts in his backyard. And how does his wife, Deborah, feel about all this?
“She thinks it makes the yard look nice,” he said. “She helps with the gardening part of it. We usually go on vacation every year to ride trains. My favorite place to ride is Colorado. They have a lot of steam trains there.”
Yarbrough particularly enjoys the nostalgia that goes along with the hobby.
“In the old days the train depot was the town’s hub of information,” he said. “People would gather there. It was a social spot. Life was at a slower pace. I try to make the trains and towns as realistic as possible. The people and buildings reflect the atmosphere from back then.”
Yarbrough says the displays are fairly easy to maintain. The buildings do sustain some wear and tear if left out in the elements year round, so he usually brings his in during the winter months. Prospective garden railroaders can research online and in books for photos of what towns and depots looked like. There are also online forums to share information as well as the magazine “Garden Railways.”
The Southeast Garden Railway Society will host a show May 1-2 at the Northwest Georgia Trade and Convention Center in Dalton. The event will feature garden railroad displays with running trains; vendors selling model trains, speaker systems and power supplies; and various clinics ranging from how to get started to how to make an aquarium train car. On May 3, garden railroading enthusiasts in Chatsworth, Resaca, Canton, Woodstock and Loganville will open their homes for tours at no extra charge.
Eventually Yarbrough would love to see a tourist train in the Dalton-Chatsworth area and perhaps a refurbished steam engine. He sees an ever-growing number of railroad lovers, especially among children with the advent of the “Thomas the Tank Engine” television series, books and videos.
“It’s something the whole family can enjoy,” he said.
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