Bakersfield & Ventura Model Railroad

I haven't had much to say here for some time, as I have been building a couple of small On30 layouts, but I've recently been thinking about jumping back into H.O. with a Bakersfield & Ventura project. I don't know that I will ever have the space to build the largish B&V layout I posted about a couple of years ago, but I could probably manage a 4 x 8 representing a small piece of it. I started looking at Iain Rice's Lilliput Logger plan, with the idea of building a version in On30, but Rice originally designed it for H.O. My slightly modified plan would work either way, with nothing more than changing the track spacing on the sidings. With H.O., I could also lower the elevation at Stauffer a little, to ease the grade a bit. In this draft, haven't even bothered to change the station names. The On30 version represented a narrow gauge line connecting to the standard-gauge B&V in Lockwood Valley, somewhere around the present-day Grade Valley Road, and running

I've been assuming that if and when I build another B&V layout, it would represent the mountain portion of the line. But in the real world, what little track the railroad built was down on the coast around Oxnard, Port Hueneme, and the southern part of what is now Camarillo. I've been putting together some cardstock buildings from Clever Models for my Lockwood & San Emigdio On30 mini-layout. The ones I've selected for that project have been mostly small wood and corrugated metal structures typical of a remote mining area, but Clever also makes a lot of buildings more appropriate to urban, industrial or harbor areas -- in fact, they sell a collection of six or eight buildings called "The Waterfront" that includes some larger industrial or warehouse-type buildings and a small coastal freighter. Which got me thinking, why not do a shelf layout of the B&V at Hueneme harbor? Here's a preliminary track plan, a "flipped" version of the classic G

What started out as a blog about my past and maybe future Bakersfield & Ventura model railroad has ended up being mostly about the narrow gauge Lockwood & San Emigdio . So I'm spinning off a separate blog for my narrow gauge work. I'll go back and clean this one up eventually, then put it on hold until I get back to working on the B&V.

I was cleaning my garage the other day and pulled out a 30x60 inch layout I started some years back in HOn30, but abandoned pretty quickly. The trains were just too small for me, and there wasn't a lot of equipment available -- there's no equivalent of Bachmann's relatively cheap and plentiful ready-to-run On30 cars and locomotives, and only a few kits. I'm kind of taking this as a sign from the fates. The overall size of the old, partly built layout is in the upper range of what I was thinking about doing in On30. The curve of N scale track at the left end in the photo is 12 inch radius, and the right end is 13 inches, both in the range of what I was considering. The rest of the track plan doesn't translate so well -- the plan drawn on the board has a passing siding on the front side that would have been short in HOn30 and would have been all but useless in On30. The upper level branchline track has a 9 inch curve, which is probably too tight for anything but an 0-

The other day, as my wife and I were rearranging some furniture in the living room, she made the comment that it might be fun to put a small train display on a side table where she normally displays some potted plants. She had in mind my Lockwood & San Emigdio On30 diorama, which she's watched me work on the last several months -- but of course, the suggestion got me thinking in other directions. Since the purpose, at least in part, will be to entertain the grandkids when they come to visit, it makes sense to have a continuous lap. Since the tabletop is only about 25 by 54 inches, that limits me to a 10 or maybe 11 inch radius, a bit more if I overlap the tabletop a few inches. I'm thinking On30, so that's too tight for any of the equipment I currently own. There are some people doing wonderful work in On30 building mini- and micro-layouts with these kinds of curves and smaller, using the Bachmann 0-4-0 and 0-4-2 Porters, Davenport gas-mechanicals, and other small switc

 As I play around with it, right now I'm leaning toward some variation on a lap-with-branch configuration. Here's the latest version, including a simplified version of the Gumstump & Snowshoe-inspired shelf layout at the end of the Staffer branch (the yellow rectangle). I've routed the branch to the left, around the inside of the left-hand loop, to get enough altitude. The mainline is pretty flat, with just a half inch or so of elevation on the back side to provide a little separation from Lockwood Yard. The branch climbs a three percent grade to cross over the main, then continues on a modest grade to Stauffer. For posterity, here are a few AnyRail "sketches"on of earlier versions: There is a door at the lower right; the gray rectangle is an existing book case. I wanted to make sure there was enough clearance to get to the door. With this one, the branch comes off the "wrong" end of the yard -- a train made up in Lockwood yard would have to back out