Train Buff Engineers a Life-Size Hobby in His Back Yard

As a child, Ward Kimball drew pictures of “choo-choo” trains. While in grade school, he spent summers with his father, a traveling salesman, riding the rails through Oklahoma, Kansas and Minnesota. And as a Walt Disney Co. artist, he created the Casey Jones Jr. locomotive featured in the cartoon movie “Dumbo.”

Now, at 76, the retired Academy Award-winning animator still plays with trains--real ones--in his own back yard.

Set back from the street and hidden from casual view by his ranch-style home, blooming bushes and about 35 orange trees, Kimball has created the Grizzly Flats Railroad. The private line is complete with two working locomotives, a passenger car, boxcar, flat-bottom gondola, wooden cattle car, Victorian-style depot and 900 feet of track, which Kimball and his friends laid themselves.

Perched above the rails is a wooden windmill and water tank, as well as a giant railroad crossing sign. Nearby stands a firehouse that stores an 1888 steam fire engine, a 1911 two-cylinder Maxwell fire chief’s car, and a 1914 hose and pumper truck.

“You can relive your childhood here,” said Kimball, who looks the part of a railroad man with his red suspenders and black felt brakeman’s hat that partially covers his long, tousled white hair. “Whenever we arrived at our destination when I was a kid, my parents would take me to meet the engineer. He would take off his big sooty glove, reach down and shake my hand. It was always a big thrill.”

Kimball and his wife, Betty, bought their first locomotive in 1938 from the Nevada Central Railroad, which was struggling as trucking began to take over as the nation’s preeminent means of hauling cargo. The Kimballs paid $500 for the 1881, 22-ton, coal-burning Baldwin and had it delivered by truck to their home, which is in an unincorporated area near San Gabriel. At the time, the house, with its two-acre lot, sat in the midst of orange groves.

“The day it arrived the farmers in the area just sort of congregated around but didn’t say a word,” recalled Kimball. “I was worried that they were thinking, ‘What the heck is this city slicker doing?’ But as the locomotive slowly creaked down from the truck, all these farmers in straw hats just started clapping.”

Later, as urban sprawl began to encroach, newly arrived neighbors would be awakened on Sunday mornings, startled by the sounds of the train whistle and the clanking of one of Kimball’s cars or locomotives moving slowly along the track.

“They’d come walking down our street in their pajamas,” said Kimball, grinning impishly as he recalls the scene. “They were stupefied. I guess the real estate man didn’t tell them about the railroad yard when they bought their houses.”

Still, nearby residents don’t seem to mind having a back yard railroad in their neighborhood. “I think it’s really neat,” said 18-year-old Johnny Delgado, whose family moved in across the street when he was 6. “Mr. Kimball puts on an old-fashioned hat and overalls like the engineers used to wear and rides the train up and down on the track. When he blows the whistle, people start coming out of their houses to watch it. Everyone around here loves it.”

Although the railroad has been in the neighborhood for more than 50 years, county code enforcement officials said there has never been a complaint. As long as Kimball does not run the railroad commercially it is considered a hobby and is allowed under county codes, said planner Elizabeth Ndubisi.

Because of anti-smog laws, Kimball doesn’t run the coal-burning locomotive anymore. Occasionally, he still cranks up the shiny black and red locomotive No. 1, a 1907, 9 1/2-ton, wood-burning Baldwin purchased from Waimanalo Sugar Co. in Hawaii in 1948.

Over the years, Kimball, with the help of friends and family, has restored his two locomotives and passenger car to their original splendor. He also has added a wood floor and an enclosing back wall to the gingerbread-style depot, which originally was a facade used in a set for the Disney movie “So Dear To My Heart.”

“The railroad hobby was a release from work at the studio,” Kimball said of his almost 40 years at Disney, where he worked on such classics as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “Pinocchio.” He is also a published writer and photographer, painter, antique toy collector, and an accomplished trombonist who has recorded 12 albums with a now-defunct jazz band, The Firehouse Five Plus Two.

“After sitting all day, I could come home and work on the railroad. It was physical work--painting, lifting, building. It was a great release.”

Kimball, who seems never to tire of his lifelong hobby, also has thousands of museum quality toy trains dating from 1870 to 1940. These pieces, made of tin, wood and cast iron, are housed in a 60-foot building, also in the back yard.

“I love watching them go,” said Kimball, whose blue eyes flash through thick, black, round-rimmed glasses as he flips the switch and watches several of the toy trains scream past each other.

In this regard, Kimball is not alone. Railroad historians, schoolchildren, curiosity seekers and friends have been invited to enjoy his private collection.

The late Walt Disney was a fan, and pop superstar Michael Jackson has spent hours playing with the elaborate toy trains, Kimball said.

Kimball won’t discuss the dollar value of his trains, saying he collected them purely for the love of railroads.

“Why do it,” he asks, “if not for fun?”