PLANS for a new railway running from town to the west of the Island have sparked intrigue and debate.
But one enthusiast is seeking to expand Jersey’s train offering – albeit on a smaller scale.
Curtis Stanier is hoping to grow his popular model village and garden railway into a permanent attraction – offering families a day out.
Mr Stanier currently runs HSBA Garden Railway out of his garden in St Mary, with around 450 people coming through his gates at each open day, held four or five times a year.
They can walk around the garden and watch the model trains up close, with bridges, tunnels, a foot crossing and a fish pond all popular with visitors. Adults can also take part in “tricky” scavenger hunts.
“I was talking to my colleague a few months ago and said ‘I just want to go play with my trains’,” he said.
“I said it sort of tongue-in-cheek – but then one of my friends was over and she said: ‘Can you not open the railway more often and make some money on that?’
“We started talking about it – my parents have a farm, they have a field, so how many people would you need?”
Mr Stanier has had G-scale trains – that can run outside – since he was a child, with the size of the setup increasing over time.
“As a kid, you start with a circle track, and then every Christmas or birthday, you get more tracks,” he said.
With aMaizin! Adventure Park closing at the end of August – and the biggest garden villages in the UK reporting visitor numbers of up to 150,000 a year – the prospect of turning HSBA into a permanent attraction seemed increasingly like a viable idea for Mr Stanier.
If he can get planning permission, he hopes to work on the village over the winter. He plans to bring over trains and build models that echo Jersey’s landscapes. He hopes to include activities for children, like letting them control some trains, control miniature diggers, race boats or pan for gold.
“Humans are meant to play. Just because you grow old doesn’t mean you have to grow up. And that’s what I’d like to do – create a space where you can do that, you can play in different ways,” he said.
It took Mr Stanier around six months of working in the evenings and weekends to build HSBA Garden Railway, and the model village he is planning would be around four or five times the size.
He added that he could imagine having partnerships, in the future, with schools or students who want to be engineers, and continue fundraising for charities.
“This is not the thing that’s going to make me a millionaire, but it is something that can bring me and a bunch of other people joy,” Mr Stanier said.
