Engines (and inspirations)

Engine #58 is one of two Consolidations on the road and is the mainstay of operations (its twin is still in the box but will be put into service once I get a new layout built). These are Bachmann engines with the original tender replaced by a Bachmann SP-style Vanderbilt oil tender. The only other modification was to shave off the "smoke deflector," or whatever it's supposed to be, on the back on the cab roof. They're fitted with TCS DCC modules. This unit has obviously been lettered for the Bakersfield & Ventura and given some weathering.

SD&AE #104

My B&V Consolidations were inspired by San Diego & Arizona Eastern #104 and her sister engines. I believe 104 was purchased second-hand from the SP, but SD&AE had a couple of nearly identical engines that they bought new. #104 was probably the first steam engine I ever saw up close. It was on display for many years at the San Diego County Fairgrounds. It's now at the Pacific Southwest Railroad Museum in Campo.

Mogul #2 was the second engine acquired by the Lockwood & San Emigdio (duh). The first was a Shay, which is currently in a box somewhere and is not available for photography. There's also an outside-frame 4-4-0. All are Bachmann products. This one started life as a Hawthorne Valley engine in a horrible black and tan (gold? copper?) Thomas Kincaide paint scheme. I removed the Colorado & Southern-style boiler-mounted air tank and remounted the bell directly on the boiler; I also fitted the tender with an oil bunker that I found online -- it was sold as a part for an HO scale locomotive, but fits nicely on this tender.

VCRy (former B&V) Mogul #1

I didn't do it on purpose, but I think L&SE #2 bears some family resemblance to Ventura County Railway (formerly B&V) #1. Martin Hansen posted this on Facebook a while back; if you like steam locomotives, you should follow him on Facebook, because he posts railroad photos from his collection nearly every day.

Here's Number 23, a Bachmann 4-6-0. No weathering on this one yet.

Comments

B&V Harbor Scene

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...

Side-Tracked

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...

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...

Bakersfield & Ventura Model Railroad

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