On track with raising money for charity through garden railway

Curtis Stanier spoke to TOM OGG about the passion for model trains that has taken over his garden

CHOO! CHOO! CHOOOOOO! The final open day of the HSBA Garden Railway will take place this weekend.
Held on Saturday 30 August, the Garden Railway Open Day will be from 9am to 4pm and, as always, it will be organised and hosted by Curtis Stanier and his wife, Nikki, in the garden of their St Mary home.
“We have two main railway tracks looping around the garden,’ said Curtis, who was nominated for a Pride of Jersey award in 2024.
“The bottom track loops around the garden pond and then through a tunnel beneath the flowerbed, while the other main track loops back on itself around the top of the garden.
‘It is a G-scale layout, which means it is larger than standard model train sets – the trains are 4% the size of the real things.’
Open to Islanders of all ages, the Garden Railway Open Day will enable visitors to see all 138 metres of the miniature railway in action, with snacks and hot chocolates courtesy of Curtis and Nikki, and with all proceeds from the event being donated to Jersey Rescue Dogs. Previous open days have raised up to £800 for the charity.
“It’s our own private garden, first and foremost, but we’ve always wanted to hold events like this for the public,” said Curtis. “It’s really nice to see the reaction of kids as they watch the trains going around the tracks. We have some cool friends whose kids just absolutely love it.”
A model train enthusiast since childhood, Curtis is unapologetically passionate about his love for small-scale locomotives and, chatting to him, it is a passion that can easily prove infectious.
“There is nothing I love more than sitting in the garden, beer in hand, and watching the trains going around the tracks,” he says. “Nikki isn’t into trains but she does like the garden railway. She likes the figures and the buildings, and she loves the gardening aspect of it, and this is where the hobby is shared. But things like laying down the tracks and the electronics and the mechanical stuff, that’s more my bag.”
Given the complexity and intricate detail of the railway, it is perhaps surprising to discover that Curtis and Nikki only moved to moved to the Island in the summer of 2021.
“It’s a good-sized garden and, as you can see, the railway takes up quite a lot of space. There was a lot of planning that went into it, which was led by me, but all done very much in partnership with Nikki. For instance, she wanted to make sure we had a grass area where we could sit and relax, and she likes dinner parties in the summer and so wanted a seating area where we could have a barbecue and host friends.”
With this in mind, the couple divided their garden in half, with the railway interlinking the two sections and with the aforementioned flowerbed in the middle.
“We call it the ‘tear drop’ because of its shape – it looks like a tear when you look at it from the upstairs window,” said Curtis. “Nikki thought it would be a nice way to break up the garden, and she was right. It feels like you have to move around to see all of the railway, which I like. I didn’t want it to be the case that I could just sit and watch the trains going round and round in circles. For me, that takes some of the magic out of it. I think it’s nice when a train disappears and then reappears out of a tunnel or from the opposite side of the garden. It makes it feel as if it’s gone on a little journey.”
Good-humoured and self-deprecating, Curtis admitted that, during construction of the railway, his ambitious nature at times almost got the better of him.
“I said to Nikki: ‘Right, I’m going to build all of the stone walls myself. I can learn how to do it on YouTube’. And she said: ‘Sweetie, you want to build a garden railway, you don’t want to build walls. Why don’t we leave that to the builders?’ This was sensible in terms of both my interests and the quality of the finished wall.”
When not working on the outdoor railway itself, Curtis can often be found in his custom-built workshop in the ground floor of the house. There, he carries out the painstakingly intricate work of assembling, adjusting, repairing and painting all manner of models, figurines and accessories.
“It’s a lot of hard work but I love it,” he said. “The outdoor track actually weaves in and out of the workshop, although I’ve got it sealed it up at the moment because, well, it’s bloody freezing.”
Born and raised in the north of England (“about an hour from Manchester”), Curtis developed his love for all things locomotive during childhood.
“I’ve always been into it ever since I got my first Hornby train set when I was about four or five,” he says. “My collection grew and grew with each birthday and Christmas.”
It was at the age of nine that Curtis received his first garden-scale – or G-scale – train: “I remember opening it for the first time and thinking: ‘Wow, this is massive’.
“We had it in the garden, it went around the flowerbed, and so that is where it all started for me. It seemed huge at the time but obviously my railway today is several magnitudes larger than the one I had as a child.”
Growing up, Curtis spent several years living in Jersey and maintained a close bond with the Island even after returning to the UK.
“My parents live here today and Nikki – who is American – loves it here. We spent five years living and working in Germany but then Nikki fell in love with Jersey and so we moved over.”
It was while living in Germany that Curtis acquired much of his sizeable collection: “Well, Germany is where most of it is manufactured – one of the most well-known model train companies is Lehmann Gross Bahn, or LGB Trains – and so I managed to get hold of quite a lot of it for pretty decent prices.
“It can get a bit expensive, though, and even more so nowadays,” he added. “The cost has definitely gone up over the last couple of years, but then I suppose so has the cost of everything.”
As Curtis explains, one of the reasons why garden railways are so expensive is that the various parts have to be able to withstand all kinds of weather, be it sun, rain, snow or otherwise.
“The buildings are made of a certain type of resin, which not only has to be water-resistant but also UV-resistant, otherwise the colours will fade as soon as the summer months arrive. And if you look around the garden at the track, there is a lot of brass, which is in itself expensive, but it needs to be brass so that it can stay outside for 12 months of the year.
“The most dangerous thing in terms of weather is actually the wind. Sometimes, if it’s been a particularly windy night, you walk outside in the morning and find everything has blown all over the garden.”
Given the not inconsiderable amount of money that Curtis has spent on his collection, I ask if he is concerned about thieves or vandals breaking into his garden and causing damage.
“Do I worry about it? Hmm, less so because it’s Jersey, and because we’re out of the way in St Mary, and because we have security cameras. I also keep all of the trains locked up at night. If anyone actually wanted to nab anything, the most viable option would be the track, and they would have to unscrew each individual piece by hand. I think someone would notice them before they were anywhere near finished.”