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How Did We Get Here?

I'm in the early stages (February 2022) of my second effort to model the Bakersfield & Ventura Railroad, as it might have been if history had been a little different ... or maybe as it is in some other parallel universe.

There's more information on the real-world B&V in my other Bakersfield & Ventura blog https://bakersfieldandventura.blogspot.com/ so I won't go into too much detail here, but in brief: The B&V was a proposed southern California railroad line that would have run from ... wait for it ... Fillmore to Maricopa. To be fair, Fillmore is not far from Ventura, and Maricopa is not too far from Bakersfield. The line would mostly have carried agricultural and petroleum-related freight between the southern San Joaquin Valley and the harbor at Port Hueneme, giving farmers and businesspeople a more direct and less expensive way to get their products to market. 

In 1907, the company bought a small streetcar line in Oxnard, extended it to serve a couple of sugar beet mills nearby, and eventually to the port, shuffling freight to and from the Southern Pacific interchange, but that's as far as it went. In 1911, when the B&V went bankrupt, the owners of one of the sugar mills bought the line and renamed it Ventura County Railway. It's still in operation today.

So how did I come to choose such an obscure prototype?

Going wa-a-a-a-y back, I grew up in San Diego County, and was always interested in the San Diego & Arizona Eastern, "The Impossible Railroad," which, like the Bakersfield & Ventura, was built late in the railroad-building era (after 1900) and was meant to provide local businesses an alternative to the big, bad, monopolistic Santa Fe. The SD&AE was originally an independent, financed primarily by John Spreckels, of Spreckels Sugar; but he ran out of money and was forced to sell part interest in the line to the SP, in return for cash and other assistance to complete the road. Eventually it was absorbed by the SP. I vaguely remember seeing SP switchers (I swear they were tiger stripes) working in San Diego when I was a kid.

Carrizo Gorge trestle on the SD&AE -- this is actually a full-size model of the original, on the San Diego Model Railroad Club layout in Balboa Park.

I was never bold enough to try to model it literally, so the layout I built in my parents' attic as a teenager was a freelance line "inspired" by the SD&AE, called the Palo Verde & Pacific. Palo Verde is an actual community on the Colorado River, and I went camping near there once as a teenager and the name stuck. It was supposed to be (like the SD&AE) a bridge route connecting the Colorado River with the coast, but it didn't have much to do with the actual Palo Verde, and where the line went was vague at best.

I took a hiatus during the 1970s and early 80s while I attended college, got married, and started a family. In the mid-1980s I became the proud owner of a garage with three-bedroom house attached, in Thousands Oaks in Ventura County, mid-way between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. I soon started work on a new iteration of the Palo Verde & Pacific. The first version lasted several years, but the design was flawed and I tore it down to the benchwork and restarted about 1990.

Meanwhile, I had become more familiar with my new home turf, including hiking and camping in the mountainous Ventura County backcountry.

Around 2000, I picked up a John Armstrong track plan book called "20 Custom Designed Track Plans." It contained a layout representing a freelance line called the San Joaquin Southwestern, which (according to the story) ran from Bakersfield to Ventura. It was filled with place names I knew and ran through country I had driven and hiked.

"Aha," says I. "A southern California short line connecting the interior with the coast, and right in my own backyard." Intriguingly, the description mentioned that the Santa Fe had considered building a route through Tejon Pass, just to the east. I also knew about a short line called the Ventura County Railway. As I started to do more research, I learned of the Bakersfield & Ventura, which appears to have been the basis for the John Allen plan -- at least, I have to assume that whoever commissioned him to design the plan knew of and was inspired by the B&V.

Soon, the PV&P became the B&V, stations were renamed, and some locomotives and other equipment relettered. Unfortunately, just a few years later I had to tear down that layout, and other interests and responsibilities have prevented me from building another.

Now, I'm approaching retirement, and anticipating having more time on my hands, so I'm in the early stages of planning a new layout based on the B&V. Or maybe not. I've picked up a few pieces of Bachmann On30 equipment the last few years, and I really like the heft of it, plus I am a sucker for old-timey narrow gauge trains. So I may build the new layout in On30, based on the Lockwood & San Emigdio. We shall see.

Approximate route of the Ventura County portion of the Bakersfield & Ventura




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