Every minute of every day after work was building this railroad. Every minute of every day.
My name is Zach. I'm a plumber by trade. Born and raised in Sonoma county.
I also like to build things on my off time. Anything and everything, I like to stay busy
anything that's hands on I love doing. Working with your hands
has always been a passion of mine, built a windmill on this property, a little water wheel,
built a hovercraft... but the Coolest Thing I Ever Made is my homemade railroad.
One day I was actually out here with some friends
and I said I'm going to build a railroad around this place.
They just thought I was crazy.
They couldn't understand what it would take and I didn't either thankfully, now everybody gets it.
It's the world's longest continuous trestle for a model ride on train. About 680 feet long,
a continuous trestle, took about three years to build
start to finish. Every minute of every day after work, putting track down when
it was almost dark and you couldn't see anymore then you'd wear a headlamp.
It was a very unbalanced life. I definitely ate, breathed, slept
building this railroad. A lot of work.
Sometimes in the mornings I'll have my coffee and do a loop, that's the coffee train
and sometimes there's the wine train but it removes you from everyday life,
it puts your mind at ease. It's kind of therapy almost. In our day and age we live in you can do
anything and everything as fast as you can um I wanted to do something that was a bygone era
that's how things used to be. a much simpler time. Slower, kind of taking in the sights,
enjoy yourself and you're not you know busy doing you know 10 things at once.
When people come out here they have no idea what it took
and I try to explain to them to give them a visual, not to impress them but to
make them understand what was involved to create this whole you know piece.
To give you an idea of the volume of materials that are required,
every five feet there's three pilings and it equates to about 450 pilings
which each held down with three bags of 60-pound cement, so kind of gives
you an idea of the amount of material required just to get the trestle up to trackage level.
So as you can see on the basic construction we got two sets of tracks. You got your inside
track here which is what the train rides on, the flanges are on the inside of this
and then you have an outside track. The train does not ride on but if there's ever a derailment this
track will actually keep the trucks within this boundary so it will not go on the side and cause a
inconvenient condition which would be the train going off the trestle so extra safety feature.
The track part of it was very small compared to everything else. You see the final product the
train rides on but there's so much more below you that you don't know
or see until you come down to this level.
So this is your typical trestle there's well over 100 of these. It's a combination of
three poles connected with a stabilizer in the bottom.
They're linked together by six two by fours for the entire length of the track.
This is one of the most time consuming things uh, once the trestle was built we had to lay all these
railroad ties every four inches you see it there's a tie, there's another tie, there's another tie...
thousands of them. You always have road ties even if it's a trestle or on the ground.
Each time you put a tie down you have to gauge it at seven and a half inches
and you want to get it about within to the millimeter, and that's done
the whole way within the millimeter so it has to be the tolerances are incredibly tight for
a train. There's engineering and railroad theory that would you know fill in books
and I had to learn a lot of the hard way basically hands on deck literally here with a screw gun
learning and this thing not tracking properly and having to redo it...so had to learn the hard way.
Like a lot of kids always love trains, we would have to train around the Christmas tree,
naturally, and then my dad would take me to railroad museums and watch the real thing,
watch them go by, put pennies on the tracks, watch them get smashed.
So I've always had a passion you know, ever since I was a small kid with trains.
This is a miniaturized version of what you would see on the railroad
back in 1920 when they went to diesel fuel. Before then it was wood burning.
The focal point's the steam engine. I found this engine in Oxnard, California made by "Role Models"
and this is what I operate from, the tender. The tender is what carries the
fuel and water to the steam engine to make it go.
Neat feature of this one is the top comes off, so this whole top removes and there's a bench seat
inside so people can ride it, kids and all that stuff, it's very uh very safe and extremely heavy.
So we're building this railroad and I kind of realized, I mean how many
railroads have I been on that they simply go in a circle and I wanted something to go to...
And I decided to build a little cabin.
This is the train stop. A little area to take a rest on those long train trips.
A little fireplace here stay warm , very cozy in the winter. It gets a bit loud though as
you can well imagine. We've had weddings, we've had you know the couple staying here.
They love it, naturally. So we'll pick them up in the morning... fun little place.
It's amazing what you can do if you put your head down. You can do anything, if you really try.
My homemade railroad is the Coolest Thing I've Ever Made.