Rick & Ruth Blank's Garden Railroads
Update: Rick and Ruth are leaving San Diego for Hawaii!
SDGRS will reluctantly say farewell to Rick and Ruth Blank. They joined SDGRS shortly after moving to San Diego in 1999 and their visiting son said, “Dad you live in San Diego it is time to move the trains to the garden.” Rick said the help given by SDGRS members had been integral to the success of the Sierra Blanco with instruction and advice on how to build a garden railway and also tremendous savings augmenting new purchases with many structures, trains and accessories from SDGRS members upgrading their railroads or no longer being able to keep their railroads going. A highlight was being the featured garden railway in the April 2007 Garden Railways magazine thanks to great photos by Bob Treat.
We thank Rick for serving on the SDGRS board for the past 15 years with one term as Vice president and also editing the newsletter during the past 8 years before handing responsibilities over the Angie and Dale. We also thank them for help with our annual picnics and the many times they have hosted us and Rick’s help building our county fair railroads.
SDGRS members were blessed as Rick and Ruth enjoyed entertaining us, with a number of open houses. The Sierra Blanco was our holiday attraction with ten Christmas open houses between 2006 and 2017. Ruth supplied hot cider, cookies and other treats while Rick went all out decorating with Christmas lights and holiday figures, decorated trees, carolers, snow play and other holiday scenes. To bring holiday magic to San Diego, Rick sewed white felt covers for roof tops lined with miniature Christmas lights and sprinkled white Perlite or Insta-Snow around the mountain towns of Sierra Blanco and Georgetown.
We got to see the Sierra Blanco without snow and holiday lights when the Blanks also invited us as they hosted the Great Train Show bus tours and the Western Regional Garden Railway tours. In 2017 J. Rennilson gave Rick the beautiful German buildings he and his beautiful wife Renate built as seen on the original Regen-Weissenstein Railroad in last month’s newsletter. Rick built new walls for the town of Regan and installed a pond, railroad track bed, and placed the Weissenstein castle on a rock in their front yard. We got to enjoy both railroads and their hospitality with bratwurst, sauerkraut, German potato salad and German deserts as Rick and Ruth hosted SDGRS open houses the last three years.
Click on the links below to visit the the layouts: