All Aboard the Mini Express

East County family will give tours of two miniature railroad gardens during annual event

By Sharon Nesbit

The Gresham Outlook, Jun 1, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

Matthew Ginn / The Gresham Outlook

Gary Lee shows off his garden railroad Monday, May 28, at his Corbett home. Built to “G scale,” where 1/2 an inch equals about 1 foot, the fictitious Baker & Grande Ronde Railroad is set circa 1890 in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon. Lee has been working on the model for four years.

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Woody Davis has delivered his fair share of rock and gravel, but never for a project quite like the one at the Hurlburt Road home of Gary and Jonette Lee.

“It got kind of big,” says Jonette Lee who was standing at the kitchen window when Davis brought in the first load of rock. “I felt the earth go boom,” she said, “and there was this huge boulder, and I didn’t realize it would be so close to the house.”

Several truck loads, a lot of pushing and shoving, one hernia and four years later the Lees have a backyard like few others, a 110-by-30-foot rock garden, with a stream, six waterfalls and a train steaming through it. If the Lees were only 3-inches tall, it would be perfect.

The landscape of the Baker and Grande Ronde Railroad is built to the scale of 1/2 inch to 1 foot. From many angles the little train and its intricate trestles fools the eye and appears to be full-sized.

“What you want to hear is that it looks just like a real train,” says Gary Lee, barely grown up at 57. He and his pop, Odell Lee, are both garden railway buffs, their wives garden railway gardeners. The two men are so nit-picky about detail and perfect scale that fellow railroaders call them “rivet-counters.”

The family’s two garden railways, Gary and Jonette’s in Corbett, and Odell and Hazel’s on Northeast 160th in East County, are two stops on the annual Railroads in the Garden Summer tour sponsored by the Rose City Garden Railway Society, held Saturday, June 16. Nine garden railways in the Portland-metro area and Vancouver are included.

“I’m so proud,” breathed Odell Lee, gazing at his son’s lavish layout. “Isn’t that breathtaking.”

Garden railways, planted with rock-garden plants and to-scale trees are best in early summer. (Though Gary Lee got his trains out last winter during a brief snowstorm to take photos.) The Lees’ miniature landscape is filled with creeping thyme, sedums and other small-leafed, low-growing plants. The train passes through a forest of dwarf Alberta spruce. Each tree gets a once-a-year bonsai-style cut to show off its branch structure. The trimming takes an hour per tree. There is always something to do when you are working on the railroad.

The rivet-counting Lees build their own track, trestles and rail-side structures and modify their trains. Odell Lee, a retired carpenter, crafted the sand tower and a fuel yard for his son’s layout. He also adds the hardware, no bigger than the heads of a straight pins, to the trestles.

Odell Lee’s own backyard railway is a reproduction of the Oregon community of Mosier, including the house with the 57 steps that he once vaulted two at a time to court his wife, Hazel. The two have been married 59 years and are parents of four sons. All four men have at least some carpentry skills and all share in a gift of music that brings them together at their parents’ home on Sunday nights to sing, play and visit.

Gary and Jonette Lee own Constructavision, a firm with 26 employees, that fabricates furniture and fittings for many Pearl District condos and, he adds, “176 Hollywood Video stores.”

Though he might be excused from building more stuff, Lee’s workshop/solace is next door to their Corbett home. Formerly an HO-scale railroad buff (HO-scale is a term hobbyists use that means a much smaller set of collectible trains), he set to work on his garden railway in 2003, commencing a Baker City train yard against the back wall of the shop. The train ran right out of the building through a tunnel into the yard. It is not quite trans-continental yet, but the rest of the track is under construction.

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